Overreach, page 16
Some stories make more sense when you stand them on their head. So it’s worth asking not why Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but why he did not do it sooner? What changed between 2014 – when Putin held back from an all-in military annexation of Donbas and other Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine – and his final decision to do so in 2022?
The answer can be divided into three sets of factors.
First and foremost in the minds of Putin’s entourage was the conviction that by the end of 2021 the jeopardy from Western influence in Ukraine and Russia had become too threatening to ignore – and all attempts to control it by meddling in Ukraine’s politics had failed.
Second, the perceived economic downsides of the invasion were deemed to be acceptable to a small coterie of KGB men who had little knowledge of how Russia’s economy really worked. A war chest of $650 billion in strategic reserves and European dependence on Russian gas, both carefully built up over a decade, were judged sufficient to ride out and mute Western protests.
The final factor was opportunity. A confluence of Western weakness in the aftermath of the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, the retirement of Angela Merkel as Europe’s senior statesperson, the electoral weakness of Zelensky and a revamped Russian army seemed to present a once-in-a lifetime opportunity. Now was the moment to put a dramatic end to decades of creeping Western influence and put Russia firmly back in the first rank of world powers. Not to strike would be to abandon Ukraine to the West – and fatally expose Russia to the encroaching existential political and military threat.
Such were the strategic considerations behind the war. But the Kremlin’s policy was not made solely on the basis of abstract strategic factors. It was made by people – and in a system with a firmly entrenched and closed leadership circle like Putin’s Russia, the decision to go to war was made by a tiny group of men with direct personal access to Putin himself. Some members of this inner Politburo had been Putin’s colleagues and personal friends since the 1970s. All had occupied a variety of senior posts in his administration since 2000.
Over those years Putin’s governments had included dissenting voices, competing interests and visions. In the Russian phrase, ‘the Kremlin has many towers.’ Various fashionable ideas had come and gone – including transforming Russia into a technological superpower, resetting relations with the US and achieving ideological leadership of the world’s conservatives, to actively creating and supporting a ‘loyal’ liberal opposition and media. But by the beginning of 2020 the last of the original thinkers behind all these initiatives – people who could have seen the coming disaster and turned Putin and his inner circle of siloviki, or men of power, away from the path of war – had gone. Only one tower remained, and it contained Putin’s oldest, most trusted and – tragically for Russia and Ukraine – most hawkish and paranoid allies. There was nobody left in the room who was free of the fatal groupthink that war was both inevitable and desirable.
As Bob Woodward brilliantly demonstrated in Plan of Attack, his narrative of America’s path to war in Iraq from 2001–03, no political system is immune to groupthink. Even in advanced democracies, government bureaucracies – especially the intelligence services – have an inbuilt tendency to seek out facts to fit the preconceptions of their leaders. But in 2020 Russia’s political system, a gerontocracy headed by men formed in the Soviet-era KGB who did not even use the internet, was particularly vulnerable. ‘Nobody wants to bring bad news to the tsar,’ said a former official who worked in the presidential administration until 2016. ‘The [official] course is clear … the competition [among advisers and institutions] is who can be most zealous in achieving the tsar’s plan.’2
The invasion of 2022 was, in the minds of the men who planned and pushed it, first and foremost a pre-emptive strike to save Russia from a looming strategic threat from the West. But it was also a battle for Russia’s future – and the future of powerful clans who wished to ensure that their power would survive the end of Putin’s tenure as president. Their task was to create a Russia in which no future Western-inspired Bolotnaya protests would be possible. By that token, the attempted murder of Aleksei Navalny in August 2020 and the invasion of Ukraine were all part of a single overarching strategic task – to protect Russia from foreign interference, and thereby protect their own power and assets.
Soon after his appointment as director of the FSB in 2000, Nikolai Patrushev described the security services as Russia’s ‘modern neo-aristocracy’. The word for ‘nobility’ in Russian is dvoryantstvo, literally members of the royal dvor or court, where the sole fount of patronage and power is the tsar himself. Twenty years later, Patrushev and all the other leading siloviki had fulfilled not just the executive functions of pre-modern courtiers but the dynastic ones too.
The children of the new nobility were appointed ministers and heads of major state corporations in their own right. Nikolai Patrushev’s son Dmitry, for instance, was appointed Russia’s minister of agriculture in 2018 after a career in banking. Aleksandr Bortnikov’s son Denis was deputy director of VTB Bank, the second-largest financial institution in Russia. The son of former Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov – a classmate in the FSB academy of Bortnikov’s younger son Andrei – was a senior executive at Gazprom Neft, the gas giant’s oil-trading arm. They made dynastic marriages to each other and in turn gave birth to a third rising generation of Putin-era aristocracy who would in time also expect to inherit Russia and all that was in it. At the beginning of his reign Putin had eliminated and despoiled the elements of the Yeltsin-era business oligarchy who dared to challenge him. But he had also created a new oligarchy of securocrats loyal solely to him.
The ideology of late Putinism was the ideology of the institution that formed the men who led it – the Brezhnev-era KGB. In the words of the poet and critic Dmitry Bykov, ‘special services have always been in the service of the past. Their main task is to stop the passage of time. They are constantly on the hunt for signs of the new because the future is advancing upon them and against them … They do everything in their power to prevent their own abolition.’3 But the existential fear of all gerontocratic regimes is that a new generation will inevitably challenge them and their values. ‘Conservation is not creative, you cannot eternally conserve memory or conserve fear of the future.’4
In the late nineteenth century Russia’s tsars, faced with a similar existential challenge from the encroaching forces of modernity, united their society behind the abstractions of ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality’ – underpinned by the creation of the myth of a sinister ‘other’ inside society in the form of Jews. The Soviet Union, for all its social conservatism, was paradoxically founded on the embrace of the future. It was, ostensibly, a state that demanded sacrifices of its people in the name of a bright, collective, communist world to come. But the tsarist-era tropes revived to underpin Putin’s kleptocratic autocracy had limited appeal to a new generation of atheistic, net-savvy, naturally capitalist and inter-connected young Russians. Unlike China or the USSR, Russia had no highly developed government and party structure, no powerful and long-established state ideology of collective prosperity, no towering achievements in space exploration or world-aweing urban and technological development to unite behind.
Though neither Putin’s siloviki – nor even ultra-conservative philosophers like Aleksandr Dugin – would put it in these terms, a war of national salvation was the only force powerful enough to stop the encroachment of the modern world and radically cut the country off from the West. The leaders of both the US and Russia during their last critical confrontation during the Cuban Missile Crisis were veterans of the Second World War and shared a deep horror of war, born of personal experience. Putin’s generation, by contrast, missed the Great Patriotic War but were raised on heroic cinematic myths of the unity, nobility and purification that came of fighting a just war against the forces of evil. War would create a new Russia grounded in patriotism and sacrifice, not the selfish pursuit of comfort and prosperity. Above all, it would create a Russia that needed men of power to lead it. ‘In wartime you do not think about IKEA or buying a new car,’ said the TV executive Molody. ‘In wartime you think of victory, and of the leaders who are saving your country from its enemies … in peacetime, you think how life could be better. In war, you think of how everything could be so much worse.’5
There was no explicit, dastardly plot to deliberately use war to turn the clock back to the future and create an isolated, reactionary Russia where they could rule unchallenged forever. On the contrary, the men who led Russia to war in 2022 insisted that they had no choice but to react to the West’s relentless encroachment on Russia’s strategic space. More, both Putin and Patrushev would claim that they were not taking anything but merely claiming what was Russia’s own by ancient right. But in practice the war represented the final triumph of an elderly Russia over a young one, of paranoid Soviet-minded conspiracy theorists over a generation of post-Soviet, postmodern practical capitalists.
The Men of Power
Four men – three of whom were former or current directors of the FSB – were to play a decisive role in leading Russia to war: Putin himself, Nikolai Patrushev, Aleksandr Bortnikov and Sergei Shoigu. Of the latter three it was Patrushev and Bortnikov who were the prime political movers, Shoigu the sometimes hesitant executor. A slightly wider group of personal intimates, all linked to Putin through service in the KGB or membership of the exclusive St Petersburg Ozero dacha collective where the city’s business and government elite lived in the 1990s, formed a chorus of approval. But, according to a source close to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, they were not privy to the full details and scale of the invasion. This second circle of Putin’s personal intimates included billionaire Yury Kovalchuk; foreign intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin; Putin’s former bodyguard and head of the Russian National Guard Viktor Zolotov; ex-KGB officer turned state oil tsar Igor Sechin; former Kremlin chief of staff and ex-KGB man Sergei Ivanov; Putin’s ex-KGB colleague from East German days and head of the state-owned technology concern Rostec Sergei Chemezov; Igor Sechin, the former KGB man who headed Russia’s Rosneft oil giant; and billionaire oil trader Arkady Rotenburg.
Other senior officials played important executive roles, but had no say in the decision-making of the innermost circle of Putin intimates and were not his personal friends. This group of loyal executives included Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Sergei Beseda, the FSB colonel-general in charge of relations with the near abroad, and Dmitry Kozak, the Kremlin’s man on the ground in the rebel Donbas republics.
Patrushev
Over the two decades of Putin’s rule the title of ‘grey cardinal’ of the Kremlin has been attached to several prominent figures – most famously to ideologue Vladislav Surkov and Rosneft head Igor Sechin. But the title properly belonged to Nikolai Patrushev, consistently the single most important and powerful figure in Putin’s inner circle from the late 1990s onwards.
Like most members of the Kremlin’s top elite, Patrushev was born in Leningrad, in 1951, a year before Putin himself. The son of a Soviet naval officer, Patrushev studied at the Leningrad Shipbuilding Institute and briefly worked as a naval engineer before being recruited by the KGB in 1975. Putin, by contrast, was never headhunted by the secret police but, by his own account, applied to the KGB on his own initiative several times before finally being accepted.6 The two young officers met in the Leningrad KGB. But of the two it was Patrushev, not Putin, who was the high flyer. Patrushev attended the KGB school in Minsk and later the higher school of the KGB in Moscow before joining the prestigious anti-smuggling and anti-corruption unit of the Leningrad KGB. Putin’s career trajectory was far more modest – the KGB office in Dresden where he was posted in 1988 was a provincial post in a friendly, socialist country. ‘The high flyers were posted to capitalist countries, or had responsibilities for economic crimes,’ recalled one former KGB major-general who served in the KGB rezidentura in London during the 1980s. ‘Dresden was a backwater. [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 1980s’.7
Putin was still just a 38-year-old major when the KGB let him go in 1990. His promotion to lieutenant colonel – and with it the important-sounding honorific of ‘colonel’ – was a pre-retirement formality that allowed him to claim a slightly higher pension. Patrushev, by contrast, remained in the secret police after the collapse of the USSR, serving as minister of security of the Republic of Karelia in northern Russia and, from 1994 onwards, as head of the Directorate of Internal Security of the newly rechristened Federal Counterintelligence Service in Moscow. After March 1997, when Putin was recruited from the St Petersburg mayor’s office to the presidential administration in Moscow, he did not forget his old colleagues from Leningrad. The following May, Putin was promoted to first deputy chief of the presidential administration – and brought in his old colleague Patrushev to take his old job as head of the Kremlin’s Main Supervisory Department.
By this time the two men’s roles had been reversed, with the younger and lower-ranking Putin now the senior man. When Putin was once again promoted to head of the FSB in July 1998 he soon brought Patrushev in as his deputy and chief of the prestigious (and profitable) Directorate for Economic Security. Putin’s meteoric rise – sponsored by both Kremlin Chief of Staff Voloshin and oligarch Boris Berezovsky – continued with a promotion to secretary of the Security Council, leaving 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 in 1999, 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.8 In March 2000 Putin made his old friend Patrushev a Hero of Russia, the nation’s highest order of valour.
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’.9 In December of that year Patrushev made his remarks about the security services being Russia’s ‘neo-nobility’. Explaining the preponderance of former FSB officials in the Kremlin, Patrushev told Komsomolskaya Pravda that there was a ‘vital need to revive the Russian administrative corps with “fresh blood” … not limp idealists, but tough pragmatists who understand international and domestic political developments, emerging contradictions and threats’.10 Patrushev lost no time in taking the fight to the enemy, playing a key role in the 2006 poisoning of ex-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 the aftermath of the Maidan revolution in Kyiv, Patrushev’s belief that the United States ‘would much prefer that Russia did not exist at all’ manifested in ever more aggressive influence operations in Eastern Europe – including a failed FSB-backed coup d’état in Montenegro in October 2016.
Patrushev had been always been one of the most talkative and high-profile members of Putin’s inner circle, authorised to explain and decipher 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, whom Patrushev claimed had stated that ‘neither the Far East nor Siberia belong to Russia.’ In fact Albright had never said any such thing. The quote came from a psychic employed by the FSB who claimed to have read the thoughts in Albright’s mind while in a state of trance.11 In April 2022 Patrushev claimed that a ‘criminal community who fled Ukraine’ were ‘engaged in the widespread business of the sale of orphans taken out of Ukraine’. The trade in orphans was deliberately abetted by Western governments, Patrushev claimed. These same governments had also covertly ‘revived the shadow market for the purchase of human organs from the socially vulnerable segments of the Ukrainian population for clandestine transplant operations for European patients’.12
In June 2020 Patrushev gave a lengthy and chilling interview where he outlined the world view that would become the underpinning of the Ukraine invasion less than two years later. According to Patrushev, Western efforts to ‘destabilize the socio-political situation in our country’ were intensifying. ‘An extensive network of foreign non-profit NGOs and domestic public structures dependent on them is being created on Russian territory to implement so-called democratic programs and projects that meet the interests of Western states,’ explained Patrushev. ‘The West unites and supports [Russia’s] non-systemic opposition financially … interferes in Russian elections at the federal and regional levels.’ Citing ‘data at our disposal’, Patrushev announced that US-backed subversive elements inside Russia were
