JRL NEWSWATCH: “What Putin’s No. 2 Believes About The West” – The Atlantic: Leon Aron
“A secret-service overlord’s delusional outlook becomes the party line in Russia—with global implications.”
“… Nikolai Patrushev … second-most powerful man in Moscow … [c]urrently … head of Russia’s Security Council … has been a colleague of … Putin’s since … the Leningrad KGB in the 1970s and is now the president’s confidant and top adviser. A general of the army and … former director of the FSB … Patrushev is also … de facto overlord of the country’s other secret services. Among Kremlin courtiers, he alone appears licensed to speak for Putin on strategic matters, including nuclear weapons, the war in Ukraine, and Russia’s view of the U.S., Europe, and NATO. … [M]any top Russian bureaucrats compete in conjuring up monstrous conspiracy theories. … [E]ven in this cracked-up crowd, Patrushev stands out for the luridness and intensity of his anti-West — and especially anti-U.S. — animus. The hyperbole of his comments would make … Soviet propagandists … blush: His prominence is a reminder that, if Putin were to lose power tomorrow, his potential successors could be more warlike and expansionist, not less. Americans should worry about how much Patrushev’s outlook reinforces his boss’s — and about how his delusional, more-belligerent-than-Putin fulminations in long interviews with top-circulation Russian newspapers become the party line … in the mind of millions of Russians. In Patrushev’s telling, the West has been maligning and bullying Russia for half a millennium … [with] ‘Russophobic’ Western historians besmirch[ing] Russia’s first czar, … mass murderer and sadist … Ivan the Terrible. …”