Nikolai Patrushev: Vladimir Putin’s radical crown prince

Nikolai Patrushev is one of Vladimir Putin’s closest confidants. Some believe he may succeed Putin if he is allowed to make his own decisions.

Nikolai Patrushev avoids the international arena. But he likes to give interviews to the Russian media – and is not stingy with bold theses: for example, Ukrainian refugees in European countries are now organizing the illegal adoption of orphans from their own country. In April 2022, this was explained to the official newspaper “Rossiyskaya Gazeta” by the head of the Russian Security Council. In addition, black market trade in organs from Ukrainians is thriving in the West, who remove them for money. Sell ​​them.

These are examples of the particularly crude conspiracy theories the 72-year-old entertains in interviews – and they’re only the tip of the iceberg: the EU? According to Patrushev, is on the verge of collapse. America? Viruses were created in “biological military laboratories” and feared an attack on their national territory from South and Central America. Russia on the other hand: a centuries-old culture founded on “spirituality, compassion and kindness”.

Patrushev is an influential conspiracy believer: he has officially been the secretary of the National Security Council of the Russian Federation since 2008. The body, where key ministers, secret servicemen and other top officials meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, has only consultative functions on paper. But Patrushev was more than a security adviser.

In an interview with D-Online, Fabian Burghardt of the Regensburg Leibniz Institute says, “He is certainly the closest to Putin from the security forces.” Observers assume that no one in the Russian power apparatus has better connections to Putin than the secretary of the Security Council — and his crude studies also shape the president’s worldview.

“If I had to pick the figure in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle that scares me the most, it would be Nikolai Platonovich Patrushev,” wrote Mark Galliotti in Britain’s Spectator in March. According to the Russia expert, it was Patrushev who poured poison into Putin’s ear. So how dangerous is man?

Like Putin and many of the president’s confidants, Patrushev was born in 1951 in Leningrad — and later in St. Petersburg. His father fought in the Soviet Navy during World War II, his mother worked as a nurse during the war against Finland, and later reportedly worked for a construction company.

In 1974, after school and university, Patrushev decided to pursue a career with the KGB. A year later, Putin also joins the Secret Service. Patrushev and he are said to have known each other since that time.

The two’s career paths first diverged before they reunited in the late nineties. In 1999 Patrushev became head of the domestic secret service FSB. His predecessor’s name: Vladimir Putin. On New Year’s Day 1999, he took over the presidency from Boris Yeltsin. This is the time of the second Chechen war, which the Russian military is waging with extreme intensity. On New Year’s Eve, Putin and his wife reportedly flew in a helicopter over the war zone in Chechnya, where the Patrushevs toasted with champagne.

At the beginning of the first presidential term, the Russian power apparatus was also reorganized. In addition to Patrushev, Putin gathered around him a large number of secret service agents. In 2006, the FSB chief allegedly played a key role in the death of Russian double agent Alexander Litvinenko from polonium poisoning in London. An investigation later concluded that the death may have been the result of an FSB operation sanctioned by Patrushev and Putin.

The case caused great international outrage, but it did not harm Patrushev’s rise in Russia: in 2008 he assumed his current position as secretary of the National Security Council. It was another time of upheaval: Putin temporarily handed over the presidency to Dmitry Medvedev after Patrushev was said to have been pre-elected.

Experts familiar with the Kremlin’s inner circle believe the 72-year-old played a key role in Russia’s attack on Ukraine in February 2022. Three days before the attack, he explained his views at a meeting of the Security Council. “What is happening there is a local conflict orchestrated by the United States,” he said on February 21 of the situation in eastern Ukraine. In fact, Russian separatists fought there against the Ukrainian army. If US President Joe Biden can quickly end “this bloodshed”, Russia will be ready to talk again.