Speaking to a Russian state media outlet, Nikolai Patrushev was in a hyperbolic mood on Wednesday.
Russia’s national security council secretary explained how the government was determined “to free the inhabitants of [Ukraine] from the oppression of fanatics, punishers, who are rampant on Ukrainian soil, real beasts in human form. Today, Russia in Ukraine is raking the Augean stables that were created by the U.S. and its European henchmen.”
In this presentation of the Ukrainian government as a citadel of devilish “beasts” and Ukraine as a land sinking in Western excrement (cleaning the overflowing Augean stables provided Hercules with his seemingly impossible fifth labor), Patrushev’s rhetoric is both vicious and theatrical. Yet it cannot be ignored. The chief of Vladimir Putin’s spy chiefs and the ultimate Kremlin hard-liner, Patrushev now seems set to benefit from the palace intrigues that have followed Russia’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine.
It has been reported elsewhere, but Western intelligence sources tell me that Putin’s crackdown, both direct (in terms of house arrest) and indirect (in terms of isolation), on the Russian national security architecture is far broader than commonly understood.
Most relevant to Patrushev, the New York Times reported on Wednesday that Putin’s relationship with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu is breaking down. That matters because Shoigu was Putin’s closest ally and friend within his senior court of top ministers. Respected by Western security officials for his proximity to Putin and relative military professionalism, Shoigu’s weakened position will be of significant concern in the West. With the military’s voice and prestige in the Kremlin weakened, the darker side of Russian state power is likely to rise in its place.
That leads inexorably to Patrushev.
He has always held a particular animus toward the United States. He resents Washington for Russia’s Cold War defeat. Patrushev also now appears to have a sore spot for Britain. He told his Wednesday interviewer, Arguments and Facts, that “in British statements there are only threats and insults.” Like Putin, Patrushev is a former KGB officer and FSB director. Like Putin, he seeks the West’s degradation in power and influence and the subjugation of states around Russia.
Most important, Patrushev is the gatekeeper and, below Putin, the ultimate master of Russia’s big three intelligence services. While the respective directors of the GRU military foreign intelligence, FSB domestic security service, and SVR civilian foreign intelligence service have some power, Patrushev is the true spy tsar. Patrushev’s position in this power structure is quite deliberately not a secret in the Kremlin. Indeed, the often bitter hostility and sometimes brutal competition between the three services make a central supervising authority necessary. But Patrushev is now well placed to dominate the services further and advance a more aggressive agenda.
GRU Director Igor Kostyukov has been favored by Putin for his hard-liner attitudes, loyalty, and relative disinterest in public appearances. But the admiral may share in the military’s loss of prestige over Ukraine. SVR Director Sergei Naryshkin was a Putin favorite but appears to have infuriated Putin by advising him against invading Ukraine (likely suggesting his favored covert action and influence operations instead of invasion) and his cultivation of media attention (Naryshkin was publicly skewered by Putin at a pre-war press conference). Weakened by the Ukraine debacle, FSB Director Alexander Bortnikov is likely to depart office soon, perhaps replaced by Deputy Director Sergei Korolyov.
Patrushev, then, fuses the roles of U.S. national security adviser and director of national intelligence. Such a position comes with great power, allowing Patrushev to command the loyalty of different units in each of the intelligence services. In turn, Patrushev is at once invaluable to and irreplaceable by Putin. When high-profile opponents of Putin’s regime and its associated networks are killed, it is Patrushev and Putin who bear ultimate responsibility. The U.S. and Britain believe this to be the case in the assassination/attempts against Alexander Litvinenko, Sergei Skripal, Alexey Navalny, and others. Sources tell me that Patrushev is suspected of orchestrating the radio frequency attacks afflicting U.S. government personnel, a la “Havana Syndrome.” In her book Putin’s People, Catherine Belton documents Patrushev’s possible involvement in potential false flag attacks, such as the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings and the 2002 Moscow theater siege.
Put simply, Patrushev is a master of the dark arts who has an enduring impulse for aggression. Still, the craft of espionage is important to Patrushev both as a means to an end, sometimes literally, but also as a high form of cultured statecraft. Like Putin, Patrushev takes pleasure in mind games and sometimes surreal denials of reality. He offered an example of this penchant in his interview on Wednesday, claiming that while the U.S. retains operational chemical weapons, Russia is “firmly following the concept of banning the development, production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons, destroyed all stockpiles of these weapons…”
This is a blatant inversion of reality. Russia retains numerous such programs. Moscow has recently and repeatedly used weapons such as the Novichok-class nerve agent. The existence of these programs has been independently verified. Patrushev knows that the West knows he is lying. He just doesn’t care. What he cares about is the proud presentation of disdain for international democratic norms. He hates those norms and those who stand for them: the U.S. most of all.
That disdain thus defines Patrushev’s strategy, advice to Putin, and related action. He is a determined and highly capable enemy of the West. Patrushev’s rise in power and influence portends an even more hawkish Russian foreign policy.
