In March 2014, shortly after Russian troops seized Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke with U.S. President Barack Obama to discuss the first land grab in Europe since the end of World War II.
Merkel had conversed earlier in the day with Russian President Vladimir Putin and was now sharing the details of that call with Obama.
Putin was "in another world," she reportedly told the U.S. president, referring to what analysts describe as the Russian leader's alternate, some say paranoid, view of political events -- a mindset in which the United States lurks behind many of the country's misfortunes.
Eight years later, as Russia surrounds Ukraine on three sides with about 130,000 troops in what U.S. officials have warned could be a prelude to the biggest invasion in Europe in more than 75 years, Putin -- who turns 70 in October -- may be even more cut off from reality, analysts say.
Largely isolated at his residences in suburban Moscow and the Black Sea resort city of Sochi, protected by precautions amid the worst pandemic in a century, Putin is deciding his next moves -- possibly the most consequential in Europe in decades -- with input from just a handful of close advisers who share his conservative and conspiratorial view of the world, according to current and former Western officials and analysts.
WATCH: Russia is holding "unprecedented" naval exercises on the Black Sea, increasing fears that a maritime assault could be part of a possible invasion of Ukraine.
That inner circle -- which includes Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, Federal Security Service (FSB) Director Viktor Bortnikov, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) chief Sergei Naryshkin, and Investigative Committee Chief Aleksandr Bastrykin, among others -- has narrowed since 2014 as Putin's disillusionment with the West grows, analysts say.
"The future of Ukraine may hinge on a man ensconced in a bubble that both feeds his aggression and shields him from its consequences," Adam E. Casey, a postdoctoral fellow at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan, and Seva Gunitsky, a professor at the University of Toronto, wrote in an article published this month in Foreign Affairs.
Russian political analyst Tatyana Stanovaya wrote in a May 2020 report, just at the start of the pandemic, that an emerging elite grouping she called "the protectors" was becoming more influential with Putin. She described "the protectors" as an alliance between those who favored greater repression inside Russia and those who advocated a conservative ideology as a way to repel challenges that its members claim come largely from abroad.
"The protectors' ideology, unashamedly drawing on conspiracy theories, seeks to mobilize society against foreign threats and advocates stricter control over Russians' private and political life," Stanovaya said.
A specific example of a such a conspiracy claim emerged amid the tension over Ukraine: Shoigu, 66, asserted in December that U.S. mercenaries were moving an "unknown chemical compound" into the Donbas region, where Russian-backed forces are fighting the government in a war that has persisted since 2014. He gave no evidence to support the claim.
Shoigu, who has accompanied the president on several hiking and fishing trips to Siberia that are featured on state TV, is "one of Putin's few personal friends in the government," according to the book Mr. Putin by Fiona Hill, a former adviser to President Donald Trump, and Clifford Gaddy, an economist specializing on Russia.
When Putin came to power at the end of 1999, he initially surrounded himself with a wide range of advisers, from liberal economists to former colleagues from the secret services. However, he made a sharp turn to the right around 2012, the year he returned to the presidency after a stint as prime minister amid unprecedented protests against his rule.
He accused the United States of orchestrating the demonstrations that erupted in 2011 -- in part over his decision to come back to the Kremlin -- and launched a crackdown on dissent, civil society, and the opposition that would grow with each succeeding year.
"To consolidate power anew, Putin repositioned himself as a dyed-in-the-wool conservative stressing the importance of 'spiritual bonds' and traditional values that were lacking in the decadent West," Stanovaya said in the report.
In 2013, he signed legislation that ostensibly aimed at "protecting children from information advocating for the denial of traditional family values" -- the so-called "gay propaganda" law, a move that has increased social hostility toward LGBT people, according to human rights organizations.
When demonstrators in Ukraine took to the streets later that year to protest President Viktor Yanukovych's rejection of a trade agreement with the European Union in favor of closer economic ties with Russia, Putin again pointed a finger at Washington and the West. After Yanukovych fled to Russia, Putin sent in troops to seize Crimea and Moscow backed separatist forces in eastern Ukraine.
Putin's actions are widely seen to have pushed Ukraine further from Russia's orbit and strengthened its people's desire for integration with the West -- something Western officials say he and his close advisers have failed to grasp. He certainly has not accepted it publicly, instead accusing the West in a widely discussed article published in July of dividing Russians and Ukrainians, whom he has called "one people."
People who have dealt with Putin say that his conspiratorial view of the world has been deeply shaped by his years as an officer of the Soviet KGB. Several of his closest associates, who are around his age, come from a similar background and in many cases the same city, Leningrad -- now St. Petersburg.
"As he frequently asserts in both public and private, he believes there are plots and conspiracies by the United States and the West directed against him and against Russia," Hill, a Russia expert who was the senior director for Europe and Russia on Trump's National Security Council in 2017-19, wrote in a 2016 article.
"Such conspiracy thinking is consistent with his logic," Hill wrote. "The plots make sense in terms of his frame of reference -- as seen through his filters of the Cold War, his time as a KGB operative in East Germany in the late 1980s, and the prevailing political views of conservative Russia circles."
Patrushev, 70, one of Putin's closest associates throughout his years in power, is a hard-line conservative fellow former KGB officer. Born in Putin's hometown of Leningrad, he served as FSB chief from 1999 to 2008 before moving to the Security Council.
He was reportedly behind the new National Security Strategy that was released last year and took criticism of the West to a new level, claiming that Russia's "cultural sovereignty" is at risk and that its "traditional values" are "under active attack by the United States and its allies."
Sergei Naryshkin, 66, another Leningrad native who first met Putin after graduating from the Higher School of the KGB, has claimed without any evidence that Western intelligence agencies tried to assassinate Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny. Navalny, who was poisoned with a Russian-made nerve agent in Siberia in 2020, blames Putin and the FSB.
Naryshkin has also recently equated the democratically elected government in Ukraine, headed by a Jewish president, with Nazis, even as the Kremlin cracks down on the slightest form of dissent.
Bastrykin, 68, who studied at the law faculty of Leningrad State University (LGU) in the 1970s with Putin, once threatened to kill the deputy editor of opposition newspaper Novaya gazeta.
Putin's tight-knit inner circle has been fluid over the years, with people joining and falling out as they fumble or irritate the president.
Among those who have departed include former long-serving Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin, who holds more liberal views. Analysts have also speculated that former Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, a close friend of Putin from school days, as well as former President Dmitry Medvedev, are no longer part of the president's inner circle.
Brian Taylor, a Syracuse University professor who has written books on Putin's Russia, says that Dmitry Kozak, a longtime aide to the president who currently oversees talks with Ukraine on the conflict in the Donbas, may be an important voice in the current crisis. Putin has relied on Kozak, who is 63 and a lawyer by training, to tackle tough problems in the past, including instability in the North Caucasus. He is not considered to be among the conservative hawks.
Taylor says there has always been a lot of guesswork in determining who might have influence over the president's decisions -- and it has only gotten harder since the pandemic due to Putin's limited personal interaction with officials.
Unlike the United States, Putin's Russia has no "regularized interagency process" in which foreign and security officials are present and making decisions. While Putin receives information and is presented with options from various individuals, it is difficult to tell "who actually influences the decision among those options," Taylor said.
"It's more the last person that Putin talked to, rather than some kind of collective consensus of the foreign and security policymaking elites," he said. "The whole bunker presidency just makes it even more complicated."
