Valery Okulov, fired on Thursday after almost 12 years as chief executive of Aeroflot, has taken a post as one of six deputies to Transport Minister Igor Levitin, Aeroflot said in a statement on Friday.

The state-controlled airline said Okulov would oversee civil aviation.

Aeroflot's board voted to remove Okulov, the son-in-law of Russia's first president Boris Yeltsin, after he spent more than a decade creating a modern airline out of what had been a loss-making Soviet-era group.

Analysts linked the move to a political battle for dominance of Russia's aviation sector.

He will be replaced by Vitaly Saveliev, an executive at services conglomerate Sistema, who has no experience in the aviation industry.