The ever decreasing circle of men telling Putin what he wants to hear

The official video of Vladimir Putin’s 2018 presidential inauguration said it all. Shots of him walking alone down the opulent corridors of the Kremlin, then driven through Moscow streets cleared of cars and people. The tsar stands alone.

It is striking just how small Mr Putin’s inner circle of friends and advisers is – a mark of a man slow to trust, but also with a clannish indulgence for those he considers loyal. Mostly, he relies on a handful of men – always men – he met in the KGB in the 1980s or wheeling, dealing and enriching himself as deputy mayor of St Petersburg in the 1990s.

When it comes to foreign and security policy, officials such as Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister, or Mikhail Mishustin, the prime minister, are treated as staff, not trusted advisers. Even Sergei Naryshkin, the foreign intelligence chief, a loyalist and another KGB veteran, is not close to Mr Putin, something that was painfully visible in the televised bullying he received from a smirking president at Monday’s Security Council meeting.

Instead, Mr Putin relies on just three men: Nikolai Patrushev, Alexander Bortnikov and Sergei Shoigu. Mr Patrushev is the closest there is to a national security adviser in the Russian system, a KGB veteran of extremely hawkish views, who believes that the US “would much rather that Russia did not exist at all”. Mr Bortnikov, the head of the infamous Federal Security Service, is Mr Patrushev’s protégé, and echoes his master’s voice.

As for Mr Shoigu, the only figure who managed to charm his way into the president’s circle without KGB or St Petersburg connections, he may have been lukewarm about the annexation of Crimea in 2014, but seems committed to the current war.

Otherwise, most of Mr Putin’s friends did not go into government but instead business, running state enterprises or benefitting from massive government contracts; men like Igor Sechin – Mr Putin’s former aide in St Petersburg and now head of the old giant Rosneft – and Sergei Chemezov, chief executive of the Rostec Corporation, who served with the president in the KGB. They are often not so much businessmen as the beneficiaries of their friend’s patronage, gifted a life of unimaginable luxury at the taxpayer’s expense, so long as they stay on his good side.

Even so, one can wonder how far the Ukraine war might be considered the Covid war. His circle had been shrinking even before then, as liberal figures willing to challenge his assumptions like Alexei Kudrin, a former finance minister, were allowed to drift away. The draconian biosecurity regime meant to protect Mr Putin during the pandemic led to a dramatic tightening of the circle.

Looking at the official record of his working days, he was seeing far fewer people face-to-face, or even online. Two years brooding on the supposed wrongs done to him and Russia, and his own historical legacy, seems to have made him a caricature of his old self: imperious, venomous towards his enemies, high-handed with loyalists.

His decision to invade Ukraine may have been long planned but took many within the government by surprise. This has implications for our intelligence gathering but perhaps more importantly for his decisionmaking. None of his inner circle has military or diplomatic experience or knows how quickly crises can escalate. For that matter, none knows Ukraine – his main negotiator with Kyiv, Dmitry Kozak, was told to keep his views to himself when he tried to weigh in.

Mr Putin may believe he is in charge of events, but that’s probably because he won’t talk to anyone who might tell him anything he doesn’t want to hear.

‘None of his inner circle has military or diplomatic experience or knows how quickly crises can escalate’