[D66] Ukrainecrisis: Putin-deskundige Zygar analyseert Putin

[Dr. Marc-Alexander Fluks]

Bron:   New York Times
Datum:  10 maart 2022
Auteur: Mikhail Zygar
URL:    
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/10/opinion/putin-russia-ukraine.html


How Vladimir Putin lost interest in the present
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Thanks to Vladimir Putin's decision to invade Ukraine, Russia is now 
more isolated than it has ever been. The economy is under sanctions and 
international businesses are withdrawing. The news media has been even 
further restricted; what remains spouts paranoia, nationalism and 
falsehoods. The people will have increasingly less communication with 
others beyond their borders. And in all of this, I fear, Russia 
increasingly resembles its president.

I have been talking to high-level businessmen and Kremlin insiders for 
years. In 2016 I published a book, 'All the Kremlin's Men,' about Mr. 
Putin's inner circle. Since then I've been gathering reporting for a 
potential sequel. While the goings on around the president are opaque - 
Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer, has always been secretive and 
conspiratorial - my sources, who speak to me on condition of anonymity, 
have regularly been correct. What I have heard about the president's 
behavior over the past two years is alarming. His seclusion and 
inaccessibility, his deep belief that Russian domination over Ukraine 
must be restored and his decision to surround himself with ideologues 
and sycophants have all helped to bring Europe to its most dangerous 
moment since World War II.

Mr. Putin spent the spring and summer of 2020 quarantining at his 
residence in Valdai, approximately halfway between Moscow and St. 
Petersburg. According to sources in the administration, he was 
accompanied there by Yuri Kovalchuk. Mr. Kovalchuk, who is the largest 
shareholder in Rossiya Bank and controls several state-approved media 
outlets, has been Mr. Putin's close friend and trusted adviser since the 
1990s. But by 2020, according to my sources, he had established himself 
as the de facto second man in Russia, the most influential among the 
president's entourage.

Mr. Kovalchuk has a doctorate in physics and was once employed by an 
institute headed by the Nobel laureate Zhores Alferov. But he isn't just 
a man of science. He is also an ideologue, subscribing to a worldview 
that combines Orthodox Christian mysticism, anti-American conspiracy 
theories and hedonism. This appears to be Mr. Putin's worldview, too. 
Since the summer of 2020, Mr. Putin and Mr. Kovalchuk have been almost 
inseparable, and the two of them have been making plans together to 
restore Russia's greatness.

According to people with knowledge of Mr. Putin's conversations with his 
aides over the past two years, the president has completely lost 
interest in the present: The economy, social issues, the coronavirus 
pandemic, these all annoy him. Instead, he and Mr. Kovalchuk obsess over 
the past. A French diplomat told me that President Emmanuel Macron of 
France was astonished when Mr. Putin gave him a lengthy history lecture 
during one of their talks last month. He shouldn't have been surprised.

In his mind, Mr. Putin finds himself in a unique historical situation in 
which he can finally recover for the previous years of humiliation. In 
the 1990s, when Mr. Putin and Mr. Kovalchuk first met, they were both 
struggling to find their footing after the fall of the Soviet Union, and 
so was the country. The West, they believe, took advantage of Russia's 
weakness to push NATO as close as possible to the country's borders. In 
Mr. Putin's view, the situation today is the opposite: It is the West 
that's weak. The only Western leader that Mr. Putin took seriously was 
Germany's previous chancellor, Angela Merkel. Now she is gone and it's 
time for Russia to avenge the humiliations of the 1990s.

It seems that there is no one around to tell him otherwise. Mr. Putin no 
longer meets with his buddies for drinks and barbecues, according to 
people who know him. In recent years - and especially since the start of 
the pandemic - he has cut off most contacts with advisers and friends. 
While he used to look like an emperor who enjoyed playing on the 
controversies of his subjects, listening to them denounce one another 
and pitting them against one another, he is now isolated and distant, 
even from most of his old entourage.

His guards have imposed a strict protocol: No one can see the president 
without a week's quarantine - not even Igor Sechin, once his personal 
secretary, now head of the state-owned oil company Rosneft. Mr. Sechin 
is said to quarantine for two or three weeks a month, all for the sake 
of occasional meetings with the president.

In 'All the Kremlin's Men' I described the phenomenon of the 'collective 
Putin' - the way his entourage always tried to eagerly anticipate what 
the president would want. These cronies would tell Mr. Putin exactly 
what he wanted to hear. The 'collective Putin' still exists: The whole 
world saw it on the eve of the invasion when he summoned top officials, 
one by one, and asked them their views on the coming war. All of them 
understood their task and submissively tried to describe the president's 
thoughts in their own words.

This ritual session, which was broadcast by all Russian TV channels, was 
supposed to smear all of the country's top officials with blood. But it 
also showed that Mr. Putin is completely fed up with his old guard: His 
contempt for them was clear. He seemed to relish their sniveling, as 
when he publicly humiliated Sergey Naryshkin, the head of the Foreign 
Intelligence Service, who started mumbling and tried to quickly correct 
himself, agreeing with whatever Mr. Putin was saying. These are nothing 
but yes men, the president seemed to say.

As I have reported for years, some members of Mr. Putin's entourage have 
long worked to convince him that he is the only person who can save 
Russia, that every other potential leader would only fail the country. 
This was the message that the president heard going back to 2003, when 
he contemplated stepping down, only to be told by his advisers - many of 
whom also had backgrounds in the K.G.B. - that he should stay on. A few 
years later, Mr. Putin and his entourage were discussing 'Operation 
Successor' and Dmitri Medvedev was made president. But after four years, 
Mr. Putin returned to replace him. Now he has really and truly come to 
believe that only he can save Russia. In fact, he believes it so much 
that he thinks the people around him are likely to foil his plans. He 
can't trust them, either.

And now here we are. Isolated and under sanctions, alone against the 
world, Russia looks as though it is being remade in its president's 
image. Mr. Putin's already very tight inner circle will only draw in 
closer. As the casualties mount in Ukraine, the president appears to be 
digging in his heels; he says that the sanctions on his country are a 
'declaration of war.'

Yet at the same time he seems to believe that complete isolation will 
make a large part of the most unreliable elements leave Russia: During 
the past two weeks, the protesting intelligentsia - executives, actors, 
artists, journalists - have hurriedly fled the country; some abandoned 
their possessions just to get out. I fear that from the point of view of 
Mr. Putin and Mr. Kovalchuk, this will only make Russia stronger.

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Mikhail Zygar is the former editor in chief of the independent TV news 
channel Dozhd and the author of 'All the Kremlin's Men: Inside the Court 
of Vladimir Putin.'

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