– Known as a hawk – VG

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When the war began, Nikolay Patrushev was already numbered among the six or seven who were in Putin’s inner circle.

He is now referred to by experts as the one who has increased his power the most in the nearly eight months that the “special operation” in Ukraine lasted.

Valentyna Shapovalova, PhD researcher at the University of Copenhagen, responds as follows when VG asks who Putin trusts most:

– Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Russian National Security Council and former head of the FSB.

– Because?

– He shares Putin’s understanding of the world and his ambitions, and is allegedly the creator behind many of the Kremlin’s propaganda narratives. Besides, he’s very close to Putin, and strategically shrewd.

Mark Kramer, director of Cold War studies at the prestigious Harvard University, answers the same:

– Of the few people Putin met during the war, the most influential is clearly Nikolai Patrushev, Kramer tells VG.

Oscar Jonsson, a researcher at the Stockholm Department of Military Science and Military History, is also an expert on Russia. He says:

– Putin mainly stays with those he knows from the KGB in the 1970s, such as Nikolai Patrushev, Aleksandr Bortnikov and Sergey Ivanov. Defense Minister Sergej Shoigu was sidelined by Putin. He is not part of the inner circle, believes Jonsson, who believes Putin has contacts to a large extent with officials in Ukraine himself.

Even Aage Borchgrevink, senior adviser to the Helsinki Committee currently with the book “The Warlord in the Kremlin”, points out Nikolai Patrushev:

– It is clear that Putin is talking to his old friend Patrushev – and he is known as a hawk. It is still the old KGB officers who have more faith with Putin, says Borchgrevink.

Putin was successful

Nikolai Patrushev comes – like Putin – from St. Petersburg and has known the president since the 1970s. In 1999, Patrushev succeeded Putin as head of the FSB security service.

This was stated by Russia expert Mark Galeotti Patrushev is a more dangerous man of Putin. At the same time, he is 100% loyal to Putin.

– The US, Britain and their Western satellites are trying to transfer hostilities in Ukraine to Russian territory, Patrushev said earlier this week, quoted by the Kremlin Komsomolskaya Pravda.

– At the same time, Ukraine itself is being used by the Anglo-Saxons as a tool to fight our country. The goal is to suppress Russia, maintain its imaginary superiority, preserve the unipolar world, secure the opportunity to live at the expense of others, according to the newspaper.

Politico recently wrote that Nikolay Patrushev is the most likely successor if Putin is to step down now.

– It has the advantage of sharing a worldview with Putin, which is hostility towards the West in general and towards the US in particular.

– At a Security Council meeting days before Putin ordered forces in Ukraine in February, Patrushev accused Washington of pursuing a hidden agenda aimed at “collapsing the Russian Federation,” continues Politico, who also says Patrushev will have to be a transitional figure if he were to become president. Because of his age. Both he and Putin are already older than a Russian man’s life expectancy.

Powerful sons

Patrushev, like everyone else in the Russian elite, provided well for his two children. The eldest son Dmitry is the Russian Minister of Agriculture, having held important positions in the banking sector. Younger son Andrei followed in his father’s footsteps and made a career in the KGB, before becoming adviser to Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin.

– Sechin is one of Putin’s closest collaborators in the economic sector, says Oscar Jonsson.

Vladimir Putin blamed the West for sabotaging the Baltic Sea pipelines, and Patrushev said earlier this week that he recalled the CIA-backed attacks on Nicaragua’s oil installations in 1983.