The Purges in Putin’s Shrinking Inner Circle

I recently spoke by phone with Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist and an expert on the Russian state’s intelligence apparatus. Currently in London, Soldatov—along with Irina Borogan—has written “The Compatriots: The Brutal and Chaotic History of Russia’s Exiles, Émigrés, and Agents Abroad”; the pair also founded and edits the Web site Agentura.ru, which reports on Russia’s security services. (On Sunday, the site was blocked in the Russian Federation.) I called him to discuss recent reports of purges within the security services after Russian diplomatic and military failures in Ukraine, but our chat ended up touching on a wide range of topics, including the possible reasons for Vladimir Putin’s turn against his intelligence agencies, the increasing power of the military in Russia, the changes and contractions within Putin’s inner circle over the past decade, how ordinary Russians view the current conflict, and why Soldatov himself left Russia in 2020. The conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

What do we know about internal changes that have occurred in the Russian military and security services since the war in Ukraine began?

What we know is that, since the war began, Putin’s attacked the agencies already, as far as we know. So the war started at this now infamous meeting of the Russian Security Council, where Putin publicly berated the director of the S.V.R., the foreign-intelligence agency, which is a direct successor to the spy section of the K.G.B. Two and a half weeks later, we got news about the F.S.B. foreign-intelligence branch, because the F.S.B. also has a foreign-intelligence branch coming under attack. We now know about two people, two top-level officials at this department, being questioned and placed under house arrest.

Then, last week, we got news that the deputy head of the National Guard was forced to resign, and he will also probably face some sort of a criminal investigation. And he is not just National Guard. This guy is a former security-services person. He was with Putin’s personal security detail before he joined the National Guard, so he’s known personally to Putin.

How did we, or you, come by this information? And what do we know about the reasons for the moves?

Well, we know about the director of the S.V.R., Sergey Naryshkin, being humiliated, because it was done publicly, and this meeting was broadcast. We know about the F.S.B. purges because I’ve been investigating this particular unit of the F.S.B. starting in 2002, when actually I learned that there was such a thing inside of the F.S.B., which is supposed to be purely a domestic agency. But it’s obtained new powers, and they were given authority to conduct operations abroad, specifically in the former Soviet Union, meaning in Ukraine.

Last week’s news about the deputy head of the National Guard was first broken on some Telegram channel, which we know is close to the F.S.B., and a few hours later it was confirmed by official sources. But, while the Telegram channel said that the guy was detained, the official version is that he was just asked to resign.

How much do you feel comfortable speculating on the reasons for these moves? There’s some sense that the war is not going well for Russia, and so that’s what’s behind them. Do you have any sense, specifically, of why Putin might have gone after these people, and what that might suggest?

Yeah, I’ve been asking all my sources, and not only me but many Russian investigative journalists are now talking to their sources inside of Russian security and asking them, “What is going on?” It looks like Putin is getting really unhappy with the operation, but it looks like he still believes that the original plan was fine but that there were some problems with some elements. And that is why his attack on the foreign-intelligence branch of the F.S.B. is not just about bad intelligence but also about something else.

This unit is also in charge of conducting political warfare operations in Ukraine, meaning cultivating networks of agents and supporters of political groups that might be pro-Kremlin and that would support the Russian invasion. But that never happened, and, as far as I know from my sources, one of the investigations is also about how they used funds allocated to political groups in Ukraine. Maybe now it looks like Putin has gotten angry with the lack of popular support in Ukraine for the Russian troops.

But it looks like this story is developing really fast, and now we have news that it’s not only about the use of funds but also that military counterintelligence is looking into the activities of this particular department of the F.S.B. And that could mean that, finally, people in Moscow started asking themselves why the U.S. intelligence was so accurate. Military counterintelligence is mostly about mole-hunting, identifying the sources of leaks. So it looks like now Putin is getting angry, not only with bad intelligence and the bad performance in Ukraine but also about the sourcing of the U.S. intelligence about the invasion, and why U.S. intelligence was so good before the invasion, and why the Americans knew so many things about what was coming.

So Putin doesn’t think the over-all invasion plan, or the military dimensions of it, were necessarily wrong. But he’s upset with both how much intelligence America had and the political response within Ukraine to the invasion?

Yes, exactly.

There have been a lot of reports in the Western press that Putin is isolated now, whether this is because he’s been in power so long or because he doesn’t meet with many people owing to the pandemic. Do you have a sense of whether those types of reports are accurate? And do you have a sense of who Putin does talk to and what type of inner circle he has now? It feels like maybe people had a better idea of who was in his circle ten years ago.

Yeah. That’s true, and there is a reason for that. Ten years ago, Putin listened to at least several dozen different kinds of people. It might have been a very strange collection of characters: at one point, it was a film director with crazy ideas about the Russian imperial past. And, at another point, it was a journalist who was a big fan of Pinochet. There were some priests. So it was a multitude of people, but now it looks like, starting in 2016, 2017, this circle has been getting smaller and smaller. And what I’m getting from my sources is that, these days, Putin listens to only three or four people. There is Minister of Defense Sergey Shoigu, whom he trusts, and that is why Shoigu has played the main role in this invasion. There is Nikolai Patrushev, his head of the Security Council, and one of his oldest friends, who’s still close to him and was his successor as the director of the F.S.B. And probably one or two other friends from St. Petersburg, but that’s about it.

And so, in addition to the smaller circle, is your sense from people that his mindset has really changed in some way, or his character has changed in some way? I don’t want to go too far into psychoanalyzing him—

I’m not an expert on psychology. But I see, and everybody can see, that he’s still very quick at responding to people. Or, judging by his public performances, it looks like he is very quick at reacting to what people say. So it means that mentally or intellectually he’s still fine, but he might have developed some ideas from people’s adulation of him. Basically, when you are surrounded by people who just listen to you, you come to believe that you are the smartest guy in the room, and know better—and I think that was the biggest challenge for security and intelligence agencies reporting to him about what is going on in Ukraine, because everybody knows that Putin has his own strong opinions about Ukraine. He’s writing articles about the history of Ukraine, and he’s talking incessantly about Ukraine. How can you challenge him?

It’s not very clear how you can do that, especially due to this atmosphere of fear over the past seven years or so because of what I would say is selective repression against the élite. And it’s a big thing now in Russia. It’s not only that Putin tried to poison Navalny and expelled political opposition from the country. It’s also about governors and ministers in jail. You have so many people now in jail, even people from the F.S.B. So if you think, from the point of view of a military general, is it really safe to say something to Putin that he would not like? I think it’s a big challenge for them.