Russian President Vladimir Putin is the face of the country’s war against Ukraine. The other people responsible for organising and continuing the catastrophic aggression are the Russian Defence Minister, head of the Armed Forces and a trio of old pals heading the Russian Security Council and key intelligence services, British public broadcaster BBC reports.
Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu was credited with the military seizure of Crimea in 2014. He was also in charge of the GRU military intelligence agency, accused of two nerve agent poisonings – the deadly 2018 attack in Salisbury in the UK and the near-fatal attack on opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Siberia 2020.
Chief of General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Valery Gerasimov has played a major role in Vladimir Putin’s military campaigns ever since he commanded an army in the Chechen War of 1999, and he was at the forefront of military planning for Ukraine too, overseeing military drills in Belarus in January.
Secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev is one of a trio of Putin’s old comrades from the 1970s in the Soviet Union’s Leningrad, which is now St Petersburg. Patrushev has worked with Putin in the KGB service of the Soviet Union and replaced him as head of its successor organisation, the Federal Security Service (FSB), from 1999 to 2008.
The other two key confidants of Putin from the old days of Leningrad are Alexander Bortnikov, who heads the FSB, and Sergei Naryshkin – the Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia, BBC reports.
Putin’s war organising team – Shoigu, Gerasimov and Leningrad trio
