Russia’s number two thinks Siberia will be one of the safest places on Earth, and that’s why the “Anglo-Saxon elites” want to conquer the region

When the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts, it will annihilate all life on the North American continent. Siberia will become one of the safest places on Earth – which is yet another reason why the “Anglo-Saxon elites” want to conquer the region from Russia.

So says Nikolai Patrushev, the second most powerful man in Russia, writes The Atlantic. Currently head of Russia’s Security Council, Patrushev has been a colleague of Vladimir Putin since the two served in the KGB in Leningrad in the 1970s, and is now the president’s confidant and top adviser. An army general and former director of the FSB – the successor agency to the Soviet KGB – Patrushev is also the de facto master of the country’s other secret services. Among Kremlin courtiers, he is the only one who appears authorized to speak for Putin on strategic matters, including nuclear weapons, the war in Ukraine and Russia’s views on the US, Europe and NATO.

Following Putin’s lead, many top Russian bureaucrats are racing to invoke monstrous conspiracy theories. However, even in this crowd, Patrushev stands out for the harshness and intensity of his anti-Western and especially anti-American animosity.

The hyperbole of his comments would make Soviet propagandists blush. Its prominence is a reminder that if Putin were to lose power tomorrow, his potential successors could be more bellicose and expansionist. Americans should worry about how much Patrushev’s perspective reinforces that of his boss — and how his ravings, more bellicose than Putin’s in long interviews with major Russian newspapers, become the line party, which the deafening propaganda then inoculates in the minds of millions of Russians.

According to Patrushev, the West has been slandering and intimidating Russia for half a millennium. Since the 16th century, Western “Russophobic” historians have denigrated Russia’s first tsar, Ivan IV – a sadistic mass murderer better known as Ivan the Terrible. Patrushev insists that Ivan is just a victim of an invented “black legend” that “presented him as a tyrant”.

For the head of the Security Council, the Western siege of Russia in the 20th century had nothing to do with communism and the Cold War. In fact, the fall of the powerful Soviet Union made the country a softer target for Western plotters, and the United States sought to exploit this opportunity, forcing Russia to give up “sovereignty, national consciousness, culture, and an independent domestic policy.” The ultimate goals of the conspiracy are to dismember Russia, eliminate the Russian language, remove the country from the geopolitical map and confine it to the borders of the Duchy of Muscovy, a small medieval realm.

Patrushev’s fixation

In Patrushev’s world, the US is inventing new viruses in biological weapons laboratories to annihilate the peoples of “unacceptable states”, and the COVID-19 virus “could have been created” by the Pentagon with the help of some of the largest transnational pharmaceutical companies and “the Clinton, Rockefeller, Soros and Biden foundations”.

Patrushev’s biggest current fixation is “this whole Ukraine thing” – a confrontation that was allegedly “set up in Washington”. In 2014, he said, the US orchestrated the Maidan revolution in Kiev – a “coup d’état” – which ousted a pro-Moscow president and tried to imbue Ukrainians with “hatred of everything Russian “. Today, Ukraine is nothing more than a testing ground for outdated US weaponry, as well as a place whose natural resources the West would prefer to exploit mercilessly – and “without the native population”. Keeping Ukraine as a sovereign state is not in America’s plans, Patrushev claims. Afraid to attack Russia directly, “NATO instructors send Ukrainian boys to certain death” in the trenches. Indeed, the West is essentially perpetrating an “annihilation” of Ukrainians, while Russia’s objective is to “end the bloody experiment of the West to destroy the brotherly people of Ukraine.”

While providing his countrymen with elaborate and paranoid interpretations of the world, Patrushev participates vigorously in shaping it. Increasingly a political decision-maker in his own right, he frequently takes Putin’s place in key negotiations with top allies, reducing Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to ceremonial duties and signing meaningless treaties. As the exiled Russian journalist Maxim Glikin pointed out, Patrushev is where foreign policy meets war. This nexus is expanding inexorably.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, Patrushev traveled to Tehran in November 2022 to negotiate the purchase of Iranian drones. He traveled to Latin America to meet with President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua. With Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, Patrushev discussed the “color revolutions orchestrated by America”, the “destructive activities” of non-governmental organizations and the sending of Cuban troops to Belarus “for training”.

Patrushev was allegedly involved in the 2006 London poisoning of FSB defector Aleksander Litvinenko and the attempted assassination in Salisbury, England, of former double agent Sergei Skripal 12 years later. Patrushev is also plausibly suspected of direct involvement in the murder, last August, of Evgeny Prigojin, the boss of the Wagner mercenary group. Nor would he be a stranger to the death in prison of the prominent opponent of the regime, Aleksei Navalnyi. As Russian opposition essayist Aleksander Rîklin has pointed out, the only officials who could have authorized Navalny’s slow execution are Putin and Patrushev.

Patrushev has influence over Russia’s nuclear strategy

Perhaps most frighteningly, Patrushev has some influence over Russia’s nuclear strategy. In October 2009, he announced in an interview with the Russian newspaper Izvestia that Russian nuclear weapons are not only used in a “large-scale” war. Contrary to the restriction specified in the 2000 version of Russian military doctrine, Patrushev proposed that Russia’s nuclear weapons could be deployed in a conventional regional conflict or even a local one. He also believed that in a “critical situation”, a pre-emptive strike against an aggressor “cannot be ruled out”. Four months later, Putin signed a revision of the doctrine. As Patrushev had suggested, a conflict would no longer have to be “large-scale” for Russia to reach its atomic bombs and missiles.

The pendulum of Russian history has generally swung between brutal, belligerent regimes and gentler, less repressive autocracies retreating from confrontation with the West. But this model may no longer hold for the post-Putin future. After a quarter of a century under Putin, Russia’s secret services, the foundation of his regime, have degraded all other institutions and monopolized power. Patrushev, who turns 73 in July, is a year older than the president. However, should he survive Putin, Patrushev will surely deploy his secret army to help guide the transition and may have a chance to emerge victorious. As he likes to say, the truth is on his side. conchhide The Atlantic.