By the beginning of 2020 the only men in Putin’s inner circle were his oldest, most trusted and – tragically for Russia and Ukraine – most hawkish and paranoid allies. The invasion of 2022 was, in the minds of the Soviet-era fantasists who planned and pushed it, first and foremost a pre-emptive strike to save Russia from a looming strategic threat from the West.
Ukraine was merely the battlefield where the two former superpowers’ interests came into direct confrontation – the location for what Putin’s closest circle imagined was a millennial battle between the two sides. “Ukraine does not exist,” Viktor Zolotov, Putin’s former bodyguard who now heads the powerful Russian National Guard, told Alexei Venediktov, the editor-in-chief of the Echo Moskvy radio station. “It is the border of America and Russia.”
But it was also a battle for Russia’s future – and the future of influential clans who wished to ensure that their power would survive the end of Putin’s tenure as president. The ideology of late Putinism was the ideology of the institution that formed the men who led it – the Brezhnev-era KGB.
Putin turned 70 last month – three years older than the life expectancy of the average Russian male. However healthy or otherwise Putin might be, to the siloviki, Putin’s “men of power”, that meant that time was running out to find a decisive solution to the West’s aggression. And that meant dealing once and for all with the problem of Ukraine.
Four men – three of whom were former or current directors of the Federal Security Service (FSB) – were to play a central role in leading Russia to war: Putin himself; Nikolai Patrushev, chairman of the Security Council and Putin’s KGB colleague since 1975; Putin’s old St Petersburg University classmate and FSB head Aleksandr Bortnikov; and Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu. Of the latter three, it was Patrushev and Bortnikov who were the prime political movers, Shoigu the sometimes hesitant executor.
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Over the two decades of Putin’s rule the title of “grey cardinal” (a powerful decision-maker or adviser who operates behind the scenes) of the Kremlin has been attached to several prominent figures but the title properly belonged to Nikolai Patrushev, consistently the single most important person in Putin’s inner circle from the late Nineties onwards.
The two had met as young officers in the Leningrad KGB but, as one former KGB major-general who served in London during the Eighties recalled, Putin “was a grey moth, a nobody. His career in the KGB was completely mediocre.” It was Patrushev, not Putin, who was “one of the [KGB’s] rising stars of the Eighties”.
By the late Nineties, the two men’s roles had been reversed but Putin did not forget his old colleagues from Leningrad. As Putin’s meteoric rise continued with a promotion to secretary of the Security Council, he left his old post as FSB director to be occupied by Patrushev.
Putin was chosen as Yeltsin’s prime minister – and likely successor – in August 1999. On New Year’s Eve, on the night that Yeltsin made his surprise announcement that Putin would replace him as acting president, Patrushev and Putin flew to Chechnya with their wives to bolster Russian troops’ morale, drinking champagne as they flew in the helicopter above the combat zone.
As Putin joked to a group of KGB veterans after his election in 2000, “The special operation to take over the highest echelons of power has been successful.” Later that year Patrushev made remarks about the security services being Russia’s “neo-nobility”.
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Patrushev lost no time in taking the fight to the enemy, playing a key role in the 2006 poisoning of the former FSB whistleblower and defector Alexander Litvinenko in London. “The FSB operation to kill Mr Litvinenko was probably approved by Mr Patrushev and also by President Putin,” concluded a UK public inquiry into the murder.
In 2008 Putin appointed Patrushev to the post of secretary of the Security Council, the fifth time in a decade he’d taken over a post formerly held by Putin. Patrushev would play a key role in an increasingly assertive foreign policy and repressive internal security practice. In early 2014, when clashes between protesters and security forces in Kyiv culminated in the overthrow of the Ukrainian government, Patrushev’s belief that the United States “would much prefer that Russia did not exist at all” manifested itself in ever more aggressive influence operations in Eastern Europe – including a failed FSB-backed coup d’état in Montenegro in October 2016.
Patrushev had always been one of the most talkative and high-profile members of Putin’s inner circle, authorised to explain official Kremlin policy to the Russian press and public. It was a clear sign of his seniority and the trust placed in him by Putin personally.
In his many interviews Patrushev revealed not only a remarkable degree of paranoia but a willingness to believe some extraordinary conspiracy theories. In 2015, for instance, Patrushev said that “the Americans believe that we control [our natural resources] illegally and undeservedly because, in their view, we do not use them as they ought to be used”. In support of this claim he cited former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who Patrushev claimed had stated that “neither the Far East nor Siberia belong to Russia”. Albright had never said any such thing. The quote came from a psychic employed by the FSB who claimed to have read Albright’s mind.
In April 2022 Patrushev claimed that a “criminal community” was “engaged in the widespread business of the sale of orphans taken out of Ukraine”. He claimed the trade was abetted by western governments, which had “revived the shadow market for the purchase of human organs from the socially vulnerable segments of the Ukrainian population for clandestine transplant operations”.
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In 2020 Patrushev gave a lengthy and chilling interview where he outlined the world view that would underpin the Ukraine invasion less than two years later. “The West,” he explained, “supports [Russia’s] non-systemic opposition financially... interferes in Russian elections at the federal and regional levels.”
He specifically named the US State Department, a variety of American NGOs and George Soros’s Open Society Institute as the agencies involved in Washington’s ongoing attack on Russia’s statehood.
To Patrushev, taking decisive action to “neutralise the threat” and “counteract the unfolding anti-state process” was not just a race against time but a question of Russia’s very existence.
Even as Patrushev spoke to the government weekly newspaper Argumenty i Fakty in June 2020, a team of operatives under the orders of FSB chief Aleksandr Bortnikov was preparing to fight back against the man regarded by the siloviki as the US’s most dangerous agent inside Russia: opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
On August 19 a team broke into Navalny’s hotel room in Tomsk, Siberia, and by their own account smeared novichok nerve agent on the seams of Navalny’s underpants as they lay in a drawer. The next day Navalny went into a coma on board a flight back to Moscow and would have died if the pilots had not made an emergency landing in Omsk.
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Navalny survived, but was later convicted on charges of fraud; Patrushev moved on to framing a permanent solution to the Ukraine problem. In an updated version of Russia’s national security strategy published in May 2021 and coordinated by Patrushev, the Russian state was explicitly allowed to use “forceful methods” to “thwart or avert unfriendly actions that threaten the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Russian Federation”. In other words, the use of military force outside Russia’s borders was effectively pre-authorised. It was a legal blueprint for the coming invasion.
Bunker mentality
Covid hit Russia hard. As the pandemic gathered pace in April 2020, Putin retreated from his usual residence of Novo-Ogarevo in the suburbs of Moscow to a more remote presidential residence near Lake Valdai, between Moscow and St Petersburg. At Novo-Ogarevo and Valdai $85 million was spent on building quarantine accommodation for staff and visitors as well as buying state-of-the art testing equipment. Anyone coming into contact with Putin was required to observe strict individual quarantine on-site for at least a week. Fresh from victories in Tokyo, Russian Olympic medallists were told they would have to spend a week in quarantine before meeting the president – and were banned from any interaction with each other. “I still can’t believe I’ll have to sit in one room for seven days,” Angelina Melnikova, a gymnast, wrote on social media.
Moscow officially emerged from lockdown on June 9, 2020. Putin, however, remained in lockdown. He would continue to be extremely cautious to the point of paranoia about the virus two years later. In February 2022 the French president, Emmanuel Macron, refused a Kremlin request that he take a Russian Covid-19 test when he arrived to see Putin in Moscow. According to two sources in Macron’s entourage, French security advisers had warned their president not to allow Russia to get hold of his DNA. (Putin himself had been equally cautious about his DNA for years, taking a chemical toilet with him on all foreign trips.)
As a result, at their Kremlin meeting Macron and Putin sat at opposite ends of a vast white table at least six metres long. Why was Putin so scared of Covid? In April 2022 the investigative journalism site Proekt.media published a detailed study based on flight movements of top Russian cancer doctors and Putin’s disappearances from the public eye between 2016 and 2020.
From 2019 onwards Putin was accompanied on all his trips by no fewer than nine staff doctors – and among those who spent time with him were a team of neurosurgeons from the Central Clinical Hospital, Moscow, and Dr Evgeny Silovanov, a renowned oncologist specialising in thyroid cancer in the elderly, who spent 166 days with Putin over 36 visits. The Proekt team suggested that Putin may have undergone surgery for cancer in September 2020. In May 2022, the US film-maker Oliver Stone – who interviewed Putin many times between 2015 and 2019 – claimed that Vladimir Putin has “had this cancer” but “I think he’s licked it”.
However, in July 2022, the CIA director William Burns said that he had found no evidence of Putin’s alleged illness – and quipped dryly that Putin was “entirely too healthy”.
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Putin’s personal contact had for years been limited to a small group of no more than three dozen insiders. During Covid that bubble had shrunk far tighter still.
In the “seclusion and inaccessibility” of his Covid bunker, surrounded by “ideologues and sycophants”, Putin developed a “deep belief that Russian domination over Ukraine must be restored”, according to former Kommersant newspaper political editor Mikhail Zygar. Or as the CIA’s Burns would put it in April 2022, “Putin’s risk appetite has grown as his grip on Russia has tightened. His circle of advisers has narrowed and in that small circle it has never been career-enhancing to question his judgment or his almost mystical belief that his destiny is to restore Russia’s sphere of influence.”
Over two years in isolation, Putin developed a longstanding enthusiasm for historical theorising, which would culminate in an essay on Russia and Ukraine published in July 2021. The essay, according to one senior state TV executive, was “entirely [Putin’s] own work… the result of much research and deep thought”. His companion in that process of deep thought was an old and trusted friend who was willing to put his business on hold and spend time inside Putin’s Covid world – Yury Kovalchuk.
If Nikolai Patrushev was Putin’s most powerful silovik colleague and ally, Yury Kovalchuk was his most powerful friend from a different stage of his career – the tangled web of business, Communist Party and organised crime interests that Putin navigated with great skill as consigliere to St Petersburg’s mayor, Anatoly Sobchak. According to a Russian government official I will call Sergei Ryzhy, Patrushev was for Putin “an ideal of KGB rectitude” and implacable “vigilant patriotism”. His relationship with Kovalchuk was different, if no less close. Kovalchuk was “a man of a less exalted world”, said Ryzhy, someone whom Putin trusted with the “more mundane matters” of his personal business interests and those of his immediate family.
Kovalchuk had moved on from the murky world of St Petersburg business. In May 2008, Forbes Russia listed him as Russia’s 53rd richest man, with an estimated fortune of $1.9 billion, and Bank Rossiya’s largest shareholder, holding 30.4 per cent of its stock.
International finance was not Kovalchuk’s only interest. He had long been fascinated by the mystical nationalist writings of Ivan Ilyin, a Thirties philosopher of Russian fascism.
As Putin sat in lockdown researching and penning his long historical essay on Russian destiny and its relationship with Ukraine, Kovalchuk spent much of the time by his side at the Valdai residence. As president and banker sat together the ideological manifesto of the coming war’s philosophy was born.
The publication of Putin’s historical essay in July 2021 served as a clear signal not only to the Russian public but to the Kremlin elite that rescuing the Russians of Ukraine from oppression was the new party line. It was a call to arms. At the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the essay was immediately flagged up as the start of a new and dangerous phase in the Kremlin’s thinking.
Sabres rattled, sabres drawn
By midsummer of 2021, a “critical mass” of opinion among the innermost circle of Putin’s friends and advisers had coalesced around the necessity of landing a “decisive military blow”, according to Ryzhy. Exactly what form that blow against Ukraine would take – the creation of a pair of Georgia-style mini-states in Donbas, a Crimea-style annexation or a full-scale strike to decapitate the Zelensky government altogether and install a puppet, pro-Moscow regime – remained undecided. But by late summer of 2021 the “decision in principle” that an invasion was necessary had already, according to Ryzhy, been made by top siloviki Patrushev and Bortnikov. All that remained was to assemble the necessary forces and to persuade Russia’s ultimate decision-maker – Putin – to launch the operation.
Despite military preparations kicking into high gear, foreign minister Sergei Lavrov was given a final chance to make diplomacy work. Russia’s foreign minister was fully aware that the momentum inside Putin’s inner circle was already firmly resolved on war – though Lavrov himself would not know until the very eve of the operation that these plans would include an attack on Kyiv. “Putin is our last hope to avert war,” Lavrov confided to an old university friend. Lavrov still held out some hope that the boss himself – if none of his siloviki were around him – might be persuaded to step back from the brink. But the momentum was so great that Lavrov would have to secure some truly dramatic, and frankly unrealistic, concessions from the West. Through the first and second weeks of December a working group personally convened by Lavrov put together a set of demands that he knew would be the very last shot at peace.
The ultimatum-like set of demands published on December 17, 2021, was a major overshoot. Russia demanded that Nato effectively retreat to its pre-2007 borders by promising not to deploy missiles, heavy weapons or large troop concentrations to any of the former Soviet bloc member states. To puzzled officials at Britain’s Foreign Office, the Russian demands “simply did not make any sense” to “anyone who had any experience of Russia-Nato diplomacy”, according to a senior source who spoke to the British prime minister at the time, Boris Johnson, on a daily basis during that period. “There was nothing in it that Nato could possibly agree to.” The document was “fantastical”.
Fatally, top British diplomats – in common with many governments around the world, including Ukraine’s – drew precisely the wrong conclusion. Lavrov’s extreme demands were, in truth, an indication of how far the hawks in the Kremlin had moved away from the idea of compromise. But the British interpreted the Kremlin’s bizarrely hardline position as a sign that Putin would be willing to settle for far less – an outrageous gambit that could be bargained down. Downing Street fully believed the warnings of the Ministry of Defence and the Pentagon that Putin was “ready for war and had a plan for that war in place”, recalled the Downing Street source. “It’s just that we believed that there was more of a chance to talk him back [from war] than there really was.”
Putin’s detailed plans for an invasion may not have been a secret to the CIA, but they were kept from all but the most senior Russian military commanders. The full extent of the invasion plan was also kept secret from all but the innermost circle of Putin’s confidants. Perhaps the only truly impressive operational detail in an invasion that would go disastrously wrong was the ruthlessly effective security that was maintained around the heart of Putin’s plan – to decapitate the Ukrainian government with a blitzkrieg strike backed up by mercenary assassins.
Small wonder, then, that both western leaders and most of the best-connected members of Russia’s elite continued to believe that Putin was attempting to pull off a bluff of historic proportions. One source was assured by the oligarch Mikhail Fridman just days before the invasion that Fridman’s “most highly placed friends in the security services” had promised him that there was “no danger” of a full-scale war. In the run-up to the invasion there was, in fact, a direct inverse relationship between how well connected a person was and their belief in the reality of war. Indeed, as Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, admitted during a private lunch with an old friend of the Putin family on the fourth day of the war, the majority of Putin’s Security Council were told of the coming strike at Kyiv and Kharkiv only after the fateful February 21 meeting of the Security Council.
Even as Putin’s war machine gunned into high gear, Emmanuel Macron attempted a last-ditch reconciliation, calling Putin on February 20 and suggesting a summit in Geneva with President Joe Biden to discuss the “security architecture of Europe”. Putin was evasive. “To be perfectly frank with you, I wanted to go [play] ice hockey, because right now I’m at the gym,” Putin told Macron, according to a video recording of the conversation aired by the France 2 television channel. “But before starting my workout, let me assure you, I will first call my advisers.”
Macron thanked Putin and, after hanging up, laughed in delight. Emmanuel Bonne, Macron’s diplomatic adviser, danced a triumphant jig. The French leadership’s celebrations would be short-lived. The morning after his conversation with Macron, Putin flew to Moscow for his extraordinary meeting of Russia’s Security Council.
The tsar and his court
The Security Council meeting of February 21 was remarkable in many ways. The setting of the Kremlin’s St Catherine Hall was unique in its formality and grandeur – a clear signal that something momentous and historic was afoot. The vast, garishly restored ceremonial halls of the Kremlin were familiar to Russian TV viewers from various demonstrations of adulation by Russia’s political and cultural elite as they listened to and applauded Putin’s annual state of the union addresses.
This time, the Kremlin hall was not packed but empty save for the president himself, seated at a vast white table, and the members of the council seated at a bizarre distance from him. And as the meeting progressed, the content of the broadcast, too, became more and more extraordinary. The sight of humble ministers dutifully reporting to Putin was a staple of Russian television. So was the occasional ritual humiliation by Putin of oligarchs and senior officials. But for the first time the Russian public saw the chilling spectacle of the entire security establishment of their country assembled for public obeisance to – and abuse from – their supreme leader.
In the Soviet era, the only public display that could hint at the changing power relations inside the Politburo was the order in which the USSR’s gerontocratic rulers would file onto the roof of Lenin’s Mausoleum for the annual May Day parade. Putin’s regime offered something far more interesting – an hour-long display of Russia’s new Politburo offering their “opinion” of a possible recognition of the independence of the Donbas republics, followed by a personal response by Putin himself. The event was certainly carefully orchestrated. But it was also very revealing – including in ways that the Kremlin spin doctors did not intend.
It began with a mind game. As Peskov confided to the source with whom he lunched on February 28, all the members of the Security Council had been told – falsely – that the meeting would be broadcast live. That was a lie. As sharp-eyed reporters noticed, the times on the watches of the participants showed that the meeting took place hours before it was shown on TV.
It continued with a ritual that Professor Mark Galeotti, an expert in Russian security at University College London, described as “King Lear meets James Bond’s Ernst Stavro Blofeld”. One by one, the council members stood not to speak their mind on whether the republics of the Donbas should be recognised as independent states so much as to count the ways in which they agreed with Putin.
The ultra-hawks Nikolai Patrushev and Aleksandr Bortnikov were the most obviously assured in their delivery and extreme in their lies and eschatological fantasies. FSB director Bortnikov ran through an extraordinary list of alleged Ukrainian provocations – including “genocidal” attacks on the civilians of Donbas. Security Council secretary Patrushev claimed that the conflict was being driven by the machinations of western powers whose “goal is the destruction of Russia”. Defence minister Shoigu bizarrely focused on the left-field idea that Ukraine was planning nuclear rearmament.
The Federation Council speaker Valentina Matviyenko led a chorus of support with a variation of the “genocide” line, citing outrages against Russian speakers in Ukraine. The deputy chair of the Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, the former liberal appointed by Putin as his stand-in as president between 2008 and 2011, had reinvented himself as a hawk in a desperate bid to remain in Putin’s inner circle. He pleaded for everyone to think of the children of Donbas whom – he claimed, in defiance of opinion polls at the time – the people of Russia were clamouring to protect by means of war. Interior minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev went for an even more hawkish position by arguing that Russia should not only recognise the current borders of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, collectively known as the LDNR, but also push to extend their borders.
But the particularly interesting responses came from the members of the Putin cabinet who were clearly the most uncomfortable with the unfolding events. This group included the men best informed about Russia’s position in the world. Sergei Lavrov – playing the consummate diplomat – simply waffled and avoided giving a straight answer on whether he approved of the recognition of the LDNR. Prime minister Mikhail Mishustin failed to keep Lavrov’s poker face and looked distinctly uncomfortable and disgruntled, especially when Putin cut him off as he attempted to warn the council of the economic consequences of an invasion. Cowed, Mishustin quickly toed the party line.
The two men in the hall who had the most detailed knowledge of actual events and conditions in Ukraine came in for the roughest ride. Dmitry Kozak, the Kremlin’s on-the-ground point man for relations with the LDNR and Crimea, who had grown up in Ukraine, attempted a real discussion on the future of the Donbas republics. But Putin brusquely cut him off, twice.
The spectacle demanded a victim from among the Kremlin courtiers – and Putin chose Sergei Naryshkin, head of the Foreign Intelligence Service. Of all the people present, Naryshkin was probably the best informed on the true success of Russia’s influence operations in Ukrainian society.
Unlike Kozak or Mishustin, Naryshkin made no attempt to debate, much less contradict, Putin’s decision. But he did fluff his lines, expressing his support for the recognition of the LDNR in a future tense suggestive of ambiguity. “You will support or you do support?” barked Putin.“Tell me plainly.” Naryshkin, trembling at the podium like a flustered schoolboy, responded that he supported “bringing them into Russia”. Wrong again. “That’s not what we are discussing!” Putin snapped. “Do you support recognising their independence or not?”
Putin had made his official message clear in the direct and universally comprehensible way he had communicated for two decades – the language of boss–subordinate relations. At its most superficial, he had signalled that recognition of the Donbas republics was right and proper, in the collective and unanimous opinion of Russia’s top public statesmen. Subconsciously, but with equal clarity, he had also denoted who was in the inner circle, who was in the chorus, who was on the edges. And most of all, who was the ultimate boss.
But Putin had also signalled something far more profound, something that would ultimately be far more significant for the coming conflict. The most deluded and the most ideologically driven members of Putin’s entourage were on the inside, while those with the most detailed real-world knowledge were on the outside. Like King Lear, indeed, Putin showed in his Security Council meeting that he was interested not in debate but in ritual public displays of approval. Dissent was no longer conceivable. There could be no clearer indication that the nature and power dynamics of Putin’s court had changed. As had Putin himself. He had become the leader of a nation about to launch a great patriotic war.
The following day, February 22, the Duma formalised the recognition. Putin travelled back to the Kremlin for a rare press conference with a group of journalists from the Kremlin press pool. According to one of the people in the room Putin looked “pale and puffy but energised… unusually emphatic and aggressive”.
Asked by veteran Kremlin correspondent Andrei Kolesnikov of Kommersant whether he thought that “anything in this modern world can be resolved by force”, Putin reacted sharply. “Why do you think that good should never be backed by force?” He also denied that Russian forces would “deploy right away” to Donbas. Putin was lying. Russian forces were already mobilised.
The next day, back at Novo-Ogarevo by 5pm, Putin took a telephone call from the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. According to the official readout of the conversation, Putin “expressed disappointment that the USA and Nato have ignored Russia’s legal and reasonable concerns and demands”.
Though Putin and Erdogan had known each other for more than two decades and described each other as “friends”, there was no mention in the conversation of any imminent full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
According to a source in Turkey’s Foreign Ministry who has worked with Erdogan since 2003, “There was no indication or warning whatsoever of what Putin was planning.”
At some point on the evening of February 23, Putin sat down in the television studio at Novo-Ogarevo to record another message to his people, the second in as many days. This one announced that he had given orders to begin a “limited military special operation” against Ukraine. It was broadcast at 6am the following morning. All along the 1,250-mile border between Russia, Belarus and Ukraine a force of at least 71 battalion battle groups numbering 160,000-190,000 men – the biggest deployment of Russian troops on European soil since 1945 – rolled to war.
Extracted from Overreach by Owen Matthews, published on November 10 by Mudlark (£25)
