The tsar and his court
The Security Council meeting of February 21 was remarkable in many ways. The setting of the Kremlin’s St Catherine Hall was unique in its formality and grandeur – a clear signal that something momentous and historic was afoot. The vast, garishly restored ceremonial halls of the Kremlin were familiar to Russian TV viewers from various demonstrations of adulation by Russia’s political and cultural elite as they listened to and applauded Putin’s annual state of the union addresses.
This time, the Kremlin hall was not packed but empty save for the president himself, seated at a vast white table, and the members of the council seated at a bizarre distance from him. And as the meeting progressed, the content of the broadcast, too, became more and more extraordinary. The sight of humble ministers dutifully reporting to Putin was a staple of Russian television. So was the occasional ritual humiliation by Putin of oligarchs and senior officials. But for the first time the Russian public saw the chilling spectacle of the entire security establishment of their country assembled for public obeisance to – and abuse from – their supreme leader.
In the Soviet era, the only public display that could hint at the changing power relations inside the Politburo was the order in which the USSR’s gerontocratic rulers would file onto the roof of Lenin’s Mausoleum for the annual May Day parade. Putin’s regime offered something far more interesting – an hour-long display of Russia’s new Politburo offering their “opinion” of a possible recognition of the independence of the Donbas republics, followed by a personal response by Putin himself. The event was certainly carefully orchestrated. But it was also very revealing – including in ways that the Kremlin spin doctors did not intend.
It began with a mind game. As Peskov confided to the source with whom he lunched on February 28, all the members of the Security Council had been told – falsely – that the meeting would be broadcast live. That was a lie. As sharp-eyed reporters noticed, the times on the watches of the participants showed that the meeting took place hours before it was shown on TV.
It continued with a ritual that Professor Mark Galeotti, an expert in Russian security at University College London, described as “King Lear meets James Bond’s Ernst Stavro Blofeld”. One by one, the council members stood not to speak their mind on whether the republics of the Donbas should be recognised as independent states so much as to count the ways in which they agreed with Putin.
The ultra-hawks Nikolai Patrushev and Aleksandr Bortnikov were the most obviously assured in their delivery and extreme in their lies and eschatological fantasies. FSB director Bortnikov ran through an extraordinary list of alleged Ukrainian provocations – including “genocidal” attacks on the civilians of Donbas. Security Council secretary Patrushev claimed that the conflict was being driven by the machinations of western powers whose “goal is the destruction of Russia”. Defence minister Shoigu bizarrely focused on the left-field idea that Ukraine was planning nuclear rearmament.
The Federation Council speaker Valentina Matviyenko led a chorus of support with a variation of the “genocide” line, citing outrages against Russian speakers in Ukraine. The deputy chair of the Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, the former liberal appointed by Putin as his stand-in as president between 2008 and 2011, had reinvented himself as a hawk in a desperate bid to remain in Putin’s inner circle. He pleaded for everyone to think of the children of Donbas whom – he claimed, in defiance of opinion polls at the time – the people of Russia were clamouring to protect by means of war. Interior minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev went for an even more hawkish position by arguing that Russia should not only recognise the current borders of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, collectively known as the LDNR, but also push to extend their borders.
But the particularly interesting responses came from the members of the Putin cabinet who were clearly the most uncomfortable with the unfolding events. This group included the men best informed about Russia’s position in the world. Sergei Lavrov – playing the consummate diplomat – simply waffled and avoided giving a straight answer on whether he approved of the recognition of the LDNR. Prime minister Mikhail Mishustin failed to keep Lavrov’s poker face and looked distinctly uncomfortable and disgruntled, especially when Putin cut him off as he attempted to warn the council of the economic consequences of an invasion. Cowed, Mishustin quickly toed the party line.
The two men in the hall who had the most detailed knowledge of actual events and conditions in Ukraine came in for the roughest ride. Dmitry Kozak, the Kremlin’s on-the-ground point man for relations with the LDNR and Crimea, who had grown up in Ukraine, attempted a real discussion on the future of the Donbas republics. But Putin brusquely cut him off, twice.
The spectacle demanded a victim from among the Kremlin courtiers – and Putin chose Sergei Naryshkin, head of the Foreign Intelligence Service. Of all the people present, Naryshkin was probably the best informed on the true success of Russia’s influence operations in Ukrainian society.
Unlike Kozak or Mishustin, Naryshkin made no attempt to debate, much less contradict, Putin’s decision. But he did fluff his lines, expressing his support for the recognition of the LDNR in a future tense suggestive of ambiguity. “You will support or you do support?” barked Putin.“Tell me plainly.” Naryshkin, trembling at the podium like a flustered schoolboy, responded that he supported “bringing them into Russia”. Wrong again. “That’s not what we are discussing!” Putin snapped. “Do you support recognising their independence or not?”
Putin had made his official message clear in the direct and universally comprehensible way he had communicated for two decades – the language of boss–subordinate relations. At its most superficial, he had signalled that recognition of the Donbas republics was right and proper, in the collective and unanimous opinion of Russia’s top public statesmen. Subconsciously, but with equal clarity, he had also denoted who was in the inner circle, who was in the chorus, who was on the edges. And most of all, who was the ultimate boss.
But Putin had also signalled something far more profound, something that would ultimately be far more significant for the coming conflict. The most deluded and the most ideologically driven members of Putin’s entourage were on the inside, while those with the most detailed real-world knowledge were on the outside. Like King Lear, indeed, Putin showed in his Security Council meeting that he was interested not in debate but in ritual public displays of approval. Dissent was no longer conceivable. There could be no clearer indication that the nature and power dynamics of Putin’s court had changed. As had Putin himself. He had become the leader of a nation about to launch a great patriotic war.
The following day, February 22, the Duma formalised the recognition. Putin travelled back to the Kremlin for a rare press conference with a group of journalists from the Kremlin press pool. According to one of the people in the room Putin looked “pale and puffy but energised… unusually emphatic and aggressive”.
Asked by veteran Kremlin correspondent Andrei Kolesnikov of Kommersant whether he thought that “anything in this modern world can be resolved by force”, Putin reacted sharply. “Why do you think that good should never be backed by force?” He also denied that Russian forces would “deploy right away” to Donbas. Putin was lying. Russian forces were already mobilised.
The next day, back at Novo-Ogarevo by 5pm, Putin took a telephone call from the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. According to the official readout of the conversation, Putin “expressed disappointment that the USA and Nato have ignored Russia’s legal and reasonable concerns and demands”.
Though Putin and Erdogan had known each other for more than two decades and described each other as “friends”, there was no mention in the conversation of any imminent full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
According to a source in Turkey’s Foreign Ministry who has worked with Erdogan since 2003, “There was no indication or warning whatsoever of what Putin was planning.”
At some point on the evening of February 23, Putin sat down in the television studio at Novo-Ogarevo to record another message to his people, the second in as many days. This one announced that he had given orders to begin a “limited military special operation” against Ukraine. It was broadcast at 6am the following morning. All along the 1,250-mile border between Russia, Belarus and Ukraine a force of at least 71 battalion battle groups numbering 160,000-190,000 men – the biggest deployment of Russian troops on European soil since 1945 – rolled to war.
Extracted from Overreach by Owen Matthews, published on November 10 by Mudlark (£25)
