Apparently it’s Russia Week here at NP Comment. On Tuesday morning, a Russian émigré media outfit in London, the Dossier Center, published a long interview with a defector from Vladimir Putin’s Federal Guard Service (FSO). Capt. Gleb Karakulov was one of the army of communications engineers who work to keep the Russian chain of command connected to an isolated yet mobile head of state.
As a well-paid security employee bred to absolute loyalty, Karakulov was always able to see that Putin lived a life of unexplained opulence and that Russian television was full of lies and nonsense. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine convinced him that he wanted his daughter to grow up somewhere else, and Karakulov made arrangements to abscond from an assignment in Kazakhstan and take his wife and child to Istanbul. The Dossier Center has double-checked his credentials with the help of other news organizations, so if the interview is propaganda, there is at minimum a real person behind it.
In the centre’s published interview with Karakulov, the captain talks about his training, service, defection and experience with Putin. He was not in very close personal contact with the big boss, and he refuses in the interview to speculate too freely without first-hand or strong second-hand knowledge. (Even when intelligence agents like Karakulov are turned by foreign powers, they retain the old mental habits.) Still, you can’t help feeling that his interview is a whiff of history in real time; imagine if one of Hitler’s comms boffins turned up in London in the summer of 1942 and began talking to the press.
Karakulov never seems to have received any indication that Putin is in poor personal health, but his interview does confirm that the Russian president lives in a state of extreme isolation and takes outlandish security precautions. Putin, Karakulov says, is never seen using a cellphone or the internet. This is a way in which even a western business leader might display authority, but Karakulov points out that Russia’s nominal prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, always has a servant at hand with a connected laptop ready to fire up. Putin doesn’t have even that second-hand kind of internet access; all his news comes from the TV, to which he insists on having 24/7 access, or from his advisers.
Putin is still taking COVID-era measures to dodge infection, requiring aides to quarantine for two weeks before they are considered “clean” enough to approach his presence. Karakulov reports that his FSO colleagues, in whom he never found any reflection of his own misgivings about Putin and the war, don’t understand quite why the boss is so fearful of disease. (Of course, they won’t have accepted his global reputation as an enthusiastic poisoner, which could help account for his unusual fears.) Putin is still moving about between his many palaces, but he prefers to go aboard a specially disguised train, deeming this the safest mode of travel. His offices all have the same interior design to conceal his location; sometimes broadcasters will mislabel the location of footage at his behest, and faked flights and motorcades are used to add to the uncertainty.
National Post
• Twitter:
Post a Comment