The West is legalising marriage between people and animals. Ukraine’s leaders are as bad as Adolf Hitler, and the country’s nationalists are “nonhumans.”
These are the views found in President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, among the top Russian security officials who are likely to be at the table as their leader decides whether to launch an open war against Ukraine.
In remarks published by the Russian news media in the past year, these powerful men — largely born in the 1950s Soviet Union, as Putin was — have staked out even more reactionary positions than their president has, a sign of the harder-line turn that the Kremlin is taking as it escalates its fight with perceived enemies at home and abroad.
The rise of the security officials in the president’s orbit traces Putin’s evolution from a young leader who showed a friendly face to the West in the early 2000s — while surrounding himself with advisers who included prominent liberals — to the man now implicitly threatening to start a major war in Europe.
It is also a story of the Kremlin’s yearlong struggle to craft an ideology to underpin Putin’s rule: one that increasingly relies on a picture of the West as an enemy, of Ukraine as a threat and of Russia as a bulwark of “traditional values.”
“This is an attempt collectively to form a counter ideology, since Putin doesn’t have an ideology,” Konstantin Remchukov, a Moscow newspaper editor with Kremlin ties, said of what he called the “conservative-reactionary” worldview of Russia’s security elite. “The key postulate is that everyone is against Russia.”
No one really knows how Putin makes his decisions or whom he listens to most as he considers his next steps. The Russian president, the Kremlin says, is reviewing written responses the United States and Nato delivered this past week to Moscow on its security demands — including a guarantee that Ukraine never become a member of Nato.
On Friday, the Kremlin said the West’s responses did not address Russia’s biggest security concerns. But Putin himself has kept silent, avoiding public comment on Ukraine since December, despite on-camera appearances nearly every day.
That leaves the hawks around him to offer clues to his thinking. Some of them first met Putin working with him in the Soviet KGB and have been accused by Western officials of overseeing the assassinations, influence operations, cyberespionage and brutal warfare that have helped estrange the Kremlin from Europe and the US.
Putin is known for indulging misleading, anti-Western tropes, but his main national security adviser, Nikolai Patrushev, espouses them with even greater ardor. Putin paints a picture of enemies bent on falsifying Russia’s glorious past, but his foreign intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin, has taken on the fight over history as a special priority.
Putin has embraced more state involvement in the economy, but his defence minister, Sergei K Shoigu, has taken that trend to an extreme by pitching a huge state-led effort to build new cities in Siberia.
“Some kind of time machine is taking us back into the worst years of Hitler’s occupation,” Naryshkin said of Ukraine this month, describing its pro-Western government as a “true dictatorship.” He was opening an exhibit in Moscow titled “Human Rights Abuses in Ukraine.”
Shoigu last month called Ukrainian nationalists “non humans.” Patrushev has described the “Russophobia” in Ukraine as the outgrowth of a Western propaganda campaign dating to jealous European scribes who besmirched Ivan the Terrible.
“They didn’t like that the Russian czar didn’t recognise their political and moral leadership,” Patrushev said of the 16th-century tyrant known for his fearsome secret police.
Now, as Putin weighs how far to raise the stakes in Ukraine, the question is how much he adopts the conspiratorial mindset of his hawks. In Moscow, some analysts still see a pragmatic streak in Putin.
He weighs the grievances and paranoia promoted by confidants like Patrushev, they say, against the more sober input of people like Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, a technocrat charged with keeping the economy running.
— The New York Times
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
