Who Does Putin Trust? Russian Journalist Discusses

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: You have written “All the Kremlin’s Men,” and you have basically written about Putin and who surrounds him and the whole sort of situation inside the Kremlin there. What is your take on where he is now? I don’t mean physically, but in his head, who’s with him, what kind of advice he’s getting. We hear so much about how he isolated himself during the pandemic and how many of the interlocutors, certainly the foreign leaders who talk to him, report meeting a very different Putin now than they did even a year or two ago.

MIKHAIL ZYGAR, RUSSIAN JOURNALIST: Exactly. You’re absolutely right. And I was trying to describe this situation in my recent text op-ed for “The New York Times,” that even during his late meeting with President Emmanuel Macron, the French president was astonished with the fact that President Putin was lecturing him about history, and he didn’t want to discuss any present situation. He’s really obsessed by history. And, probably, that started exactly during the pandemic. According to my sources I have been talking to during the recent months, he spent his vacation during quarantine of 2020 at his Valdai residence. That’s in between Moscow and Saint Petersburg. And he was staying there with his longtime ally, longtime friend Yuri Kovalchuk, who doesn’t have any official position, who’s just a businessman. And he’s holding a doctorate in physics. But he’s considered probably man number two in Russia today. And he’s really influential. And he shares the same attitude to the global politics, to the geopolitics. And he, as well as Putin, believes that the greatness of Russian empire has to be restored. And, probably, he’s the closest person to the Russian president now. And they have been discussing those plans to restore Russian greatness since 2020. At the same time, I have heard that probably the plan or the operation of — they call it military operation, in Ukraine started being prepared almost immediately after the previous Ukrainian war after 2014, after the annexation of Crimea. And at least in the general stuff, some preparations were started, and all the documents were ready, but probably pandemic stopped those preparations. Otherwise, we could have seen that terrible war even earlier, several years ago.