2024-03-14 21:56:56
A close friend of Vladimir Putin since the early nineties and a powerful gray eminence of the Kremlin regime. Yuriy Kovalchuk does not hold any official position, yet he is perhaps the closest thing to an unlimited ruler of Russia, whose position in the Kremlin will be confirmed by the presidential election at the weekend.
A very narrow circle of people around President Vladimir Putin decided and knew long in advance about the plan of aggression against Ukraine. In an interview for Aktuálně.cz, investigative reporter and expert on the Russian secret services Andrej Soldatov spoke about three, at most four people. The president’s friend Yuriy Kovalchuk was among them.
It is not unequivocally confirmed, but the available reports indicate that alongside Putin himself, the director of the FSB secret service Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the Security Council of Russia Nikolai Patrushev and then a man moving behind the scenes of the Russian power structures were planning the invasion. Yuri Kovalchuk.
Co-owner of the Sovgaz insurance company, owner of the majority of shares in Banka Rossiya and owner of a network of internet and television media supporting Putin and the Russian regime. A man who has been called Putin’s banker for years, but in reality he is more than that. He is a confidant of the Russian dictator to such an extent that during the coronavirus pandemic, of which Putin had a panic attack, he was the only person who had access to the Russian president in a heavily guarded and hermetically sealed residence on the shores of Lake Valdai.
According to independent Russian journalists, Kovalchuk and Putin share a love of history and a desire to restore Russia as a powerful world empire. They discussed this topic at Lake Valdai during the pandemic, and in 2021 Putin published his “study” entitled On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians. This text practically denied Ukraine’s right to independent state existence and, seen in retrospect, represents the ideological justification and justification of the Russian attack.
The former author of Putin’s speeches, Abbas Galyamov, who is now a critic of the regime and lives in Israel, identified Kovalchuk as an important mover of the war against Ukraine. “The motivation of people from the security forces and the FSB to attack Ukraine is clear, because they are part of the machinery preparing for war and conflict. Kovalchuk sees Ukraine primarily as loot, as an opportunity to expand his property,” says Galyamov.
Kovalchuk and Putin are connected by the past. Together they founded a construction cooperative called Jezero in the nineties. It built luxurious expensive mansions and villas on the shores of Lake Komsomolskoye near the Finnish border. Both Putin and Kovalchuk had their plots and houses in this exclusive closed zone for the richest Russians.
Both men also share an admiration for the Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin. Unsurprisingly, supporters of a strong authoritarian monarchy and a strong Russian empire in which the Orthodox Church and the Russian people play a dominant role. Ilyin fled Russia after the Bolshevik coup in 1917 and disliked communists but advocated a conservative dictatorship of a strong leader-tsar. According to him, this is the only way to restore the “Russian greatness” that belongs to him.
He lived in Germany in the 1930s and admired the Nazi Adolf Hitler, although he claimed that he did not share all of his views and theories. He died in Switzerland and in 2005 Putin decided to return his remains to Russia and bury them in the Don Monastery. “Ilyin’s ideas and concepts have come to life in the performance of Vladimir Putin, who admires him,” historian Timothy Snyder wrote in the New Yorker magazine.
His forty-six-year-old son Boris is already rising to power behind Yuriy Kovalchuk. He heads the large state holding energy company Inter RAO, which supplies heat and electricity. According to the Russian newspaper Kommersant, however, the Kremlin expects Kovalchuk junior to occupy an even more influential position.
Dmitriy Patrushev, the son of the chairman of the Security Council and a member of the close circle of Putin’s powerful Nikolai Patrushev, is also advancing in the ranks of power. The 46-year-old politician is already the Minister of Agriculture.
“Putin does not look like a seriously ill person, but he is over seventy and anything can happen. I am personally convinced that he will be succeeded by someone from his closest circle, and it may be a younger person. The circle around Putin is so strong that nobody from the outside can force their way to power,” Russian historian and Radio Svoboda journalist Jaroslav Šimov told Aktuálně.cz.
Video: Putin explained to students about flying in a strategic bomber
Putin sat down in a flight simulator. Then he explained to the students about flying in a strategic bomber. | Video: Associated Press