On the morning of February 24, 2022, almost nobody in the Kremlin’s media machine knew a war was about to start. The directors of state television gather every Thursday for instructions, Roman Dobrokhotov of the investigative outlet The Insider told DW, and none of them had been told. “It was Vladimir Putin with the minister of defense and the security services,” he said. “Only they knew.”
That short list is the real inner circle, and it has changed very little over the years. Many of its members began their careers in Russia’s security services, which is why they are called siloviki, or enforcers.
Shoigu and Gerasimov
Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, a longtime confidant, joined Putin on hunting and fishing trips in Siberia and was once seen as a possible successor. The previous September the two went trekking in the Siberian taiga, and media reports suggested Putin used the trip to tell him he meant to capture Kyiv. Shoigu was credited with the 2014 seizure of Crimea. Yet the war went badly at the start, and the analyst Vera Mironova put it bluntly: “He’s minister of defence and was supposed to win it.” Andrei Soldatov, a Russian security expert, argued that no one else gets through to the president as well, partly because Shoigu holds sway over the historical narrative.
Valery Gerasimov, the military’s chief of staff, has held that post longer than anyone since Soviet times. He led an army during the 1999 Chechen conflict and helped plan the Crimea operation. After the stumbling invasion there was talk of sidelining him, and he missed the May 2022 Victory Day parade. In January 2023 he took over the forces in Ukraine from Gen Sergei Surovikin.
The Leningrad trio
Three men stand closer still, all of them with Putin since the 1970s in what was then Leningrad. Nikolai Patrushev worked beside him in the KGB and then succeeded him as head of the FSB, running it from 1999 to 2008. As secretary of the Security Council he speaks to Putin often, since the body meets weekly. Ben Noble of University College London called him “the most hawkish hawk.” Three days before the invasion he argued at a Security Council session that America’s “concrete goal” was to break up Russia.
Alexander Bortnikov took over the FSB when Patrushev moved on. The agency has leverage over other law-enforcement bodies and its own special forces, and the president trusts security-service information above any other source. But Soldatov said Bortnikov is not there to advise or challenge Putin.
Sergei Naryshkin, who heads foreign intelligence, has shadowed the president since the 1990s in St Petersburg. Putin humiliated him on television when he fumbled his answer on the eve of the war. “Putin loves playing games with his inner circle,” Soldatov said.
One man decides
Analysts doubted that this circle really shares power. Nikolai Petrov of Chatham House said Putin had stopped playing chief executive of “Russia Inc.” and begun behaving like a czar, deciding alone. Even Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in post for 19 years, is not thought to have a say on Ukraine; his job is winning support in Africa and Latin America. When Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, met him for talks, he left empty-handed and implied Lavrov lacked the mandate to negotiate.
Sources
- Ukraine conflict: Who's in Putin's inner circle and running the war?
- Who belongs to Putin's inner circle?
- Ukraine conflict: Who's in Putin's inner circle and running the war? (continued)
