The Russian Security Council is currently one of the most dangerous in Russia. the most powerful institutions in the country. Even more powerful than the presidential administration.
On paperis a purely advisory body responsible for advising the President on matters of national and foreign security. In practice, however, this institution, inherited from the era of the market economy, has not been maintained. soviet regime has long been at the center of political decisions in the Kremlin.
And the man behind this apparatus is Nikolai Patrushev, one of… Vladimir Poutine who could take his place if something happened to the current leader. Born in 1951, Patrushev is considered by many to be the president’s hawk, with whom he shares his imperial vision of the world.
For the academy British Mark Galeotti, expert on Russia at the Faculty of Slavic and East European Studies at University College London, is “the demon on Putin’s shoulder whispering poison in his ear”. Or, in other words, “the most dangerous man in Russia”, as Galeotti repeated in various publications.
Fame is by no means free. His numerous appearances in various national media place him as one of the most important speakers Russian disinformation about the war in Ukraine.
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Also in April, Patrushev was interviewed in the government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazetain which he began by accusing the United States of “attempting to force Russia to give up its sovereignty, its self-awareness, its culture and its independent foreign policy”. And he ended by talking about the special operation in Ukraine to “denazify the territory and destroy the foothold of neo-Nazism created by Western efforts on Russian borders”.
Proclamations that follow the line marked by the Kremlin since the beginning of the year, but taken to the extreme and embroiled in various conspiracy theories. “The West has revived the parallel market of purchasing human organs from socially vulnerable segments of the Ukrainian population for clandestine transplant operations for European patients,” he says in the interview.
spy career
In his youth, he studied naval engineering and earned a doctorate. legal Sciences. But if he is today at the head of the Security Council, it is thanks to his career as a spy.
In the 1970s he joined the KGB of what is now the KGB. St. Petersburg formerly Leningrad. It was there that he met Putin, although they worked in different departments, and he has stuck with Putin ever since.
First as an adviser to the current Russian leader when he was appointed head of the FSB (the successor agency to the KGB) in 1998. Later, when Yeltsin appointed Putin as prime minister, Patrushev replaced Putin as head of the FSB. Federal Security ServiceHe held this position for a decade.
Although he spent his career in the shadows, Patrushev’s name is inextricably linked to some of the darkest moments of Putin’s reign. This is the case of the wave of attacks that terrorized the country. in 1999 and which served as justification for the Kremlin to launch a new war in Chechnya.
Mastermind of the assassination of the opponent Litvinenko
That year, a series of bomb attacks on residential buildings claimed the lives of 300 people. They were later blamed on Chechen Islamic extremists…until a foiled attack in September of that year cast doubt on responsibility.
Specifically, when a bomb was found in the town of Ryazan, 200 kilometers from Moscow, and Patrushev confessed that it was actually made of “sugar” rather than “explosives”, because he was acting a would be organized by the FSB. Additionally, some international researchpoint to Patrushev as the mastermind behind the murder of former spy and opponent Alezander Litvinenko, who was poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 in a London hotel in 2006. However, like Putin, one of Russia’s most powerful men has always denied his involvement in this case.
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