The Purges in Putin's Shrinking Inner Circle

Sort of off topic, but I really enjoyed the anecdote about why the source left Russia in the first place:

"Then the Russian government sent me some signals that it would be better for me to leave the country. I have a Web site, which my partner and I established back in 2000. It’s a Web site that monitors the activity of the Russian security services. And it used to have a media license, because in Russia you need to have a license to be in media. So, in the beginning of 2020, our Web site was stripped of its license. But the reason provided by the Russian censorship agency, which is in charge of these media licenses, was the death of [Agentura.ru’s] editor. And, because I’m the editor, I took it as a kind of perverse humor by the Russian censors. I got several signals of the same sort, enough that, in September of 2020, we decided to leave the country."

Good section in there for people who think sanctions are bad for Putin

>Things changed, especially after Western sanctions were introduced in 2014, and mostly because of money. Before 2014–2016, we had these oligarchs, and they were, at least to some extent, independent. They had their contracts in the West, they had their contracts in the country, so they’re quite powerful. And maybe back then they could say something to Putin. This option was there.

>Now it’s completely changed because of the sanctions. What happened is that Russian oligarchs, many of them, lost their contracts in the West, and Putin was really smart about offering them financial help by providing military contracts. So you had some people who own huge enterprises producing metal, engines, this kind of thing, and they lost their contracts in the U.S. and in Europe. All of a sudden, now they had something of a problem, but because of the sanctions and because the military-industrial complex is getting bigger, they got this military contract. And that made many of the oligarchs much more dependent on the state funding.

It looks like what are left of his advisors have to walk a tight rope: Be accurate enough to not look incompetent but also don't contradict his (putin's) notion of the situation.

It's the classical case of surrounding yourself with sycophants and people who always defer and don't have a spine to push back because those who dared push back end up arrested or poisoned, etc.

Archived: https://archive.ph/uUd3c

The article alludes to this story[1] but not explicitly: the legend is that he was giving money to FSB officers to bribe Ukranian military to simply drop their weapons when the invasion happens. The FSB guys thought (I paraphrase): "Untraceable cash to prepare for an event that will never happen (invasion of Ukraine)? Wahey, get me the Mercedes dealership on the phone!". And when they found out Putin was actually serious about invading, they knew they'd be toast, so they thought they could leak the plans to the CIA to give Putin cold feet.

[1] http://www.thelowdownblog.com/2022/03/is-putins-invasion-fai...