MOSCOW — The West is legalizing marriage between folks and animals. Ukraine’s leaders are as dangerous as Hitler, and the nation’s nationalists are “nonhumans.”
These are the views present in President Vladimir V. Putin’s inside circle, among the many high Russian safety officers who’re more likely to be on the desk as their chief decides whether or not to launch an open warfare towards Ukraine.
In remarks revealed by the Russian information media within the final yr, these highly effective males — largely born within the Fifties Soviet Union, as Mr. Putin was — have staked out much more reactionary positions than their president has, an indication of the harder-line flip that the Kremlin is taking because it escalates its combat with perceived enemies at house and overseas.
The rise of the safety officers within the president’s orbit traces Mr. Putin’s evolution from a younger chief who confirmed a pleasant face to the West within the early 2000s — whereas surrounding himself with advisers who included outstanding liberals — to the person now implicitly threatening to start out a significant warfare in Europe.
Additionally it is a narrative of the Kremlin’s yearslong battle to craft an ideology to underpin Mr. Putin’s rule: one which more and more depends on an image of the West as an enemy, of Ukraine as a risk and of Russia as a bulwark of “conventional values.”
“That is an try collectively to kind a counter-ideology, since Putin doesn’t have an ideology,” Konstantin Remchukov, a Moscow newspaper editor with Kremlin ties, mentioned of what he known as the “conservative-reactionary” worldview of Russia’s safety elite. “The important thing postulate is that everybody is towards Russia.”
Nobody actually is aware of how Mr. Putin makes his choices or whom he listens to most as he considers his subsequent steps. The Russian president, the Kremlin says, is reviewing written responses the USA and NATO delivered this previous week to Moscow on its safety calls for — together with a assure that Ukraine by no means change into a member of NATO.
On Friday, the Kremlin mentioned the West’s responses didn’t handle Russia’s greatest safety considerations. However Mr. Putin himself has stored silent, avoiding public touch upon Ukraine since December, regardless of on-camera appearances almost daily.
That leaves the hawks round him to supply clues to his considering. A few of them first met Mr. Putin working with him within the Soviet Ok.G.B., and have been accused by Western officers of overseeing the assassinations, affect operations, cyber espionage and brutal warfare which have helped estrange the Kremlin from Europe and the USA.
Mr. Putin is understood for indulging deceptive, anti-Western tropes, however his major nationwide safety adviser, Nikolai Patrushev, espouses them with even better ardor. Mr. Putin paints an image of enemies bent on falsifying Russia’s wonderful previous, however his overseas intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin, has taken on the combat over historical past as a particular precedence.
Perceive Russia’s Relationship With the West
The stress between the areas is rising and Russian President Vladimir Putin is more and more prepared to take geopolitical dangers and assert his calls for.
Mr. Putin has embraced extra state involvement within the economic system, however his protection minister, Sergei Ok. Shoigu, has taken that pattern to an excessive by pitching an enormous state-led effort to construct new cities in Siberia.
“Some type of time machine is taking us again into the worst years of Hitler’s occupation,” Mr. Naryshkin mentioned of Ukraine this month, describing its pro-Western authorities as a “true dictatorship.” He was opening an exhibit in Moscow titled “Human Rights Abuses in Ukraine.”
Mr. Shoigu final month known as Ukrainian nationalists “nonhumans.” Mr. Patrushev has described the “Russophobia” in Ukraine because the outgrowth of a Western propaganda marketing campaign relationship to jealous European scribes who besmirched Ivan the Horrible.
“They didn’t like that the Russian Czar didn’t acknowledge their political and ethical management,” Mr. Patrushev mentioned of the Sixteenth-century tyrant identified for his fearsome secret police.
Now, as Mr. Putin weighs how far to lift the stakes in Ukraine, the query is how a lot he adopts the conspiratorial mind-set of his hawks. In Moscow, some analysts nonetheless see a practical streak in Mr. Putin. He weighs the grievances and paranoia promoted by confidants like Mr. Patrushev, they are saying, towards the extra sober enter of individuals like Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, a technocrat charged with conserving the economic system working.
“These persons are conservative radicals,” mentioned Mr. Remchukov, who ran the 2018 re-election marketing campaign of the mayor of Moscow, Mr. Putin’s former chief of employees. “It could be a conservative middle, however Putin is within the middle.”
Many indicators, nevertheless, level to the “radicals” gaining sway. The obvious change has been inside Russia, the place the poisoning of the opposition chief Aleksei A. Navalny in 2020 was adopted by a far-reaching crackdown final yr on activists, the information media and even lecturers. Western officers mentioned Mr. Navalny was poisoned by the Russian authorities, however Mr. Naryshkin, the overseas intelligence chief, has described the poisoning as engineered by Western brokers in search of a “sacrificial sufferer” to assist carry down Mr. Putin.
As they work to crush dissent, the hard-line safety officers are additionally on the forefront of espousing “conventional values” as Russia’s superior various to a morally decaying West. A tv channel was not too long ago fined for displaying a person with lengthy hair and painted nails — “not equivalent to the picture of a person of a standard sexual orientation.” Two bloggers had been sentenced to 10 months in jail for a sexually suggestive picture in entrance of St. Basil’s Cathedral.
“Father and mom are being renamed mum or dad primary and two,” Mr. Patrushev mentioned in a September interview, describing the West’s “overseas” values. “They wish to give youngsters the fitting to find out their very own intercourse, and in some locations they’ve gotten to the purpose of legalizing marriage with animals.”
Perceive the Escalating Tensions Over Ukraine
Mr. Putin repeated the road about “mum or dad primary and two” in an look a month later, however unnoticed the zoophilia.
As Russian troops mass close to Ukraine, one other factor of the safety officers’ ideology looms massive: the glorification of the Soviet previous. Mr. Patrushev mentioned the collapse of the Soviet Union “completely untied the arms of the Western neoliberal elite,” permitting it to impose its nontraditional values upon the world. He and his colleagues forged Russia as a nation destined to regain that standing as a bulwark towards the West, with Ukraine and different post-Soviet nations belonging to Moscow’s rightful sphere of affect.
“This is without doubt one of the darkest currents of Russian nationalism, multiplied by imperialism,” mentioned Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow on the Carnegie Moscow Middle assume tank. The objective for Russia’s safety elite, he mentioned, is “the restoration of empire.”
Mr. Putin has himself described the collapse of the Soviet Union as a “geopolitical disaster.” However he additionally used to hunt out the recommendation of a variety of officers, together with these with liberal factors of view. Now, these officers have largely been pushed out of presidency, whereas the technocrats like Mr. Mishustin nearly by no means communicate out on issues past their fast space of accountability.
That leaves the category of elite safety officers identified collectively because the “siloviki,” lots of whom — like Mr. Patrushev, Mr. Naryshkin and Aleksandr Bortnikov, Russia’s home spy chief — labored within the Ok.G.B. together with Mr. Putin.
Their sway extends effectively past safety issues: Mr. Patrushev, an avid volleyball participant, heads Russia’s Volleyball Federation, and his son is the minister of agriculture. Mr. Naryshkin oversees the Russian Historic Society, serving to to steer the cost in glorifying — and, critics say, whitewashing — Russia’s previous. Mr. Shoigu, the protection minister, indulges Mr. Putin’s curiosity within the outside as president of the Russian Geographical Society and takes Mr. Putin on common holidays into the Siberian woods.
For these officers, analysts say, rising tensions with the West are a great factor, rising their affect inside the ruling elite.
“The spiraling confrontation and sanctions don’t scare the siloviki however, quite the opposite, open up extra alternatives for them,” Tatiana Stanovaya, the founding father of a political evaluation agency, R. Politik, wrote not too long ago.
Russian analysts at the moment are left questioning whether or not Mr. Putin has sufficient of a practical streak remaining to keep away from an open warfare with Ukraine. Russia’s closure final month of Memorial Worldwide, the Moscow human-rights group that lengthy angered Russia’s safety institution for uncovering the crimes of the Soviet secret police, represented an additional swing by Mr. Putin towards the views of the siloviki.
However Western sanctions over a Ukraine incursion may have wide-ranging penalties, as proven by the plunge within the Russian inventory market amid warfare fears in current weeks. And navy casualties may carry unpredictable aftereffects in home politics and stain Mr. Putin’s legacy.
“If we have now warfare with Ukraine and fratricidal demise, then that shall be all that he shall be remembered for,” Mr. Remchukov, the newspaper editor, mentioned. “He can’t not perceive what a sin that might be.”
Alina Lobzina, Khava Khasmagomadova and Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.