Russian Safety Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev watches the Victory Day navy parade at Crimson Sq. in central Moscow on Could 9, 2022. Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP through Getty Photographs
Nicolai Patrushev is one in every of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s closest advisers and wields appreciable affect on authorities coverage as the pinnacle of the highly effective Safety Council of Russia.
The council is the place Russia’s safety coverage is formulated, and it’s the middle the place intelligence from Russian sources and networks from overseas are acquired.
Patrushev is the one who interprets that intelligence.
Patrushev typically offers interviews to state-owned media about his conspiratorial views of the West and what the Kremlin describes as Russia’s “particular navy operation” in Ukraine.
There’s nothing to counter his disinformation, as all unbiased media in Russia has been silenced.
This needs to be worrisome for the U.S. and different Western allies.
As a tutorial who tracks Putin and his inside circle, it’s obvious to me that Patrushev’s shut relationship with Putin, which started greater than 50 years in the past, has given him a great deal of affect over the president.
Each deplore the top of the Soviet Union, and each share a deep mistrust of the West that’s fueled by nonsensical conspiracy theories.
Patrushev has emerged as one of many main voices in Putin’s inside circle who desires to wage a cruel conflict in Ukraine, with the last word goal of capturing Kyiv.
In line with Mark Galeotti, a British professional on Russia’s safety providers, Patrushev is Putin’s most right-wing ideologue and is known as “the Hawk’s Hawk,” inside Putin’s inside circle.
Patrushev’s unproven conspiracy theories
It’s these near Putin, akin to Patrushev, who proceed to repeat the disinformation that Ukraine is filled with Nazis and that Russia wants to guard itself from the nefarious designs of the West.
Russia Safety Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev delivers a speech on June 24, 2021.
Alexander Zemlianichenko /POOL/AFP through Getty Photographs
Patrushev shouldn’t be shy about giving interviews. I’ve learn a lot of his interviews and essays, and so they by no means disappoint in revealing his conspiratorial mind-set.
On April 26, 2022, Patrushev gave an interview to the state Russian newspaper “Rossiskaya gazeta.
He started together with his favourite matter – the evil intentions of the West normally and america particularly.
Patrushev stated that whereas different international locations are intimidated by the U.S. and “can’t even elevate their heads,” Russia has “not solely dared, however publicly declared that it will not play by the imposed guidelines” of the U.S.
Certainly, the Russian authorities has been true to its phrase as evidenced by the brutal conflict it’s waging towards Ukraine and its folks, which is in flagrant violation of all conventions of conflict.
In the course of the interview, Patrushev talks a couple of made up “prison neighborhood who fled Ukraine” and “who at the moment are engaged within the widespread enterprise of the sale of orphans taken out of Ukraine.”
In the meantime, the West, Patrushev asserts, “has already revived the shadow marketplace for the acquisition of human organs from the socially weak segments of the Ukrainian inhabitants for clandestine transplant operations for European sufferers.”
The West, Patrushev continues, “is giving help to Ukrainian neo-Nazis, by persevering with to produce Ukraine with weapons.”
Patrushev then quotes Putin, who referred to as the West an “empire of lies” as soon as sanctions had been imposed.
In Patrushev’s world view, the West seeks to scale back the “world’s inhabitants in varied methods.” One in all which is the creation of “an empire of lies, involving the humiliation and destruction of Russia and different objectionable states.”
The friendship of Putin and Patrushev
Putin and Patrushev have identified one another since 1970.
Each hail from Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, and labored collectively in Leningrad’s KGB in numerous departments. Putin has stated that he feels a “comradeship” with Patrushev.
Each males served in Boris Yeltsin’s authorities. In 1998, Yeltsin appointed Putin to steer the FSB, the KGB successor, and Patrushev turned Putin’s first deputy.
When Yeltsin appointed Putin performing prime minister on Aug. 9, 1999, Patrushev changed Putin as director of the FSB.
Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) speaks with Nikolai Patrushev, Director of the Federal Safety Service (FSB), throughout a gathering on Dec. 29, 2007.
Mikhail Klimentyev/RIA NOVOSTI/AFP through Getty Photographs)
On New 12 months’s Eve in 1999, Yeltsin made the shock announcement that Putin would exchange him as performing president. Putin received the presidential election on March 26, 2000.
Shortly earlier than Putin received the election, the comfortable relationship between Putin and Patrushev was displayed when the 2 selected New Years Eve in 2000 to fly to Chechnya with their wives to bolster Russian troops.
This was throughout the second Chechen Warfare that occurred between 1999-2009.
Regardless of one other flip in hostilities and bloody assaults on civilians by Russian forces on the bottom, Putin and Patrushev opened two bottles of champagne and the 2 {couples} drank straight out of the bottles as they flew within the helicopter above the fight zone.
After spending an hour with a unit of shocked troopers, the group flew again to Moscow.
Putin’s energy base
Every week earlier than Putin’s inauguration on Could 7, 2000, the newspaper Kommersant famous that Putin was packing his new administration with former officers from the FSB, Russia’s principal safety company, together with the SVR, the International Intelligence Service, which had additionally been a part of the KGB throughout the Soviet interval however was now a separate company.
In a subsequent article, Kommersant wrote that the hires place “the political lifetime of Russia underneath full management of the Kremlin” with the usage of “KGB strategies.”
In an interview in December 2000, Patrushev defined the preponderance of former FSB and SVR officers within the Kremlin, the presidential administration and within the outlying areas of the Russian Federation.
Russian President Vladimir Putin (proper) and FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev fly on a helicopter to go to a navy outpost on Feb. 4, 2008.
Mikhail Klimentyev/AFP through Getty Photographs)
They had been positioned “within the highest echelons of energy,” Patrushev stated, as a result of they got here from “management roles in establishments of nationwide safety.”
He added that there was a “very important must revive the Russian administrative corps with ‘recent blood’ … not limp idealists, however powerful pragmatists who perceive worldwide and home political developments, rising contradictions and threats.”
Appointed in 2008, Patrushev has develop into the longest-serving secretary of the Safety Council. Since then, the council has modified an excellent deal from the Nineties when it was a sinecure for getting old safety forces veterans.
Patrushev has turned it right into a dynamic establishment for all issues referring to Russia’s safety and has positioned himself as chief adviser.
Galeotti, the professional on Russian safety providers, believes Patrushev to be harmful due to his “paranoid conspiracy-driven mindset.”
That is basic to understanding at the moment’s Russia as a result of Patrushev’s conspiratorial beliefs and think about of the world is the lens via which his pal Putin sees it.
Susanne Sternthal is affiliated with the Democratic Celebration.
