Putin’s Inner Circle: The Loyalists Still Running Russia
Vladimir Putin does not govern through a conventional cabinet. Power in Russia still flows through a tight, informal court built on personal history rather than job titles. The men closest to him are old KGB colleagues, St. Petersburg associates from the 1990s, former bodyguards, and a growing layer of relatives and in-laws. Formal institutions exist — above all the Security Council — but access to the president remains the real currency. That circle has grown older, more clan-based, and more brittle under the strain of a long war.
Putin’s system has always rested on loyalty first. The core of it was formed long before he became president. Several of the most important figures served with him in the KGB in the 1970s and 1980s, including the Dresden years in East Germany. Others met him when he was deputy mayor of St. Petersburg under Anatoly Sobchak. Those relationships, not ministries or elections, still decide who sits nearest the centre.
The formal map of power is the Security Council. Putin chairs it. Its permanent members include Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, Defence Minister Andrei Belousov, FSB director Alexander Bortnikov, Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Federation Council chair Valentina Matviyenko, State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, SVR director Sergei Naryshkin, presidential aide Nikolai Patrushev, chief of staff Anton Vaino, and Deputy Security Council chairman Dmitry Medvedev. Sergei Shoigu, removed as defence minister in 2024, now serves as secretary of the council. That list looks like a government. In practice it is only the outer ring of a much smaller group.
At the heart of that group sit the siloviki — the security men. Nikolai Patrushev is widely treated as the most important of them. A former FSB director and Security Council secretary, he is now a presidential aide and remains one of the most hawkish voices around Putin. He has argued for years that the West seeks to destroy Russia as a state. His son Dmitry is a deputy prime minister, part of a pattern in which the children of trusted lieutenants are placed in high but carefully balanced posts.
Alexander Bortnikov runs the FSB, the successor to the KGB’s domestic service and the main instrument of internal control. Sergei Naryshkin heads foreign intelligence. Viktor Zolotov, once Putin’s bodyguard, commands the National Guard. Dmitry Kochnev leads the Federal Protective Service, the agency that physically guards the president. Valery Gerasimov remains chief of the General Staff and one of the few officials with access to the nuclear command system. These men share a generation, a professional culture, and a suspicion of the West that predates the war in Ukraine.
Shoigu occupies a more ambiguous place. After more than a decade at the Defence Ministry he was moved to the Security Council in May 2024 and replaced by Andrei Belousov, an economist with no battlefield background. The shift was presented as a promotion. In reality it stripped Shoigu of day-to-day control of the army while keeping him inside the highest security body. Belousov’s brief has been to impose tighter financial discipline on a war machine that had become wasteful and opaque. Gerasimov stayed in place. The uniformed command was not gutted; it was put under closer civilian accounting.
Beside the security veterans sit the administrators who keep the state running. Mishustin is the prime minister and the leading technocrat, charged with holding the economy together under sanctions. Anton Vaino, chief of the presidential staff, controls the gate to Putin. Sergei Kiriyenko, first deputy chief of staff, oversees domestic politics, regional governors, elections, and much of the information system. He is not a childhood friend of the president, but his institutional power has grown steadily. Yuri Ushakov, a career diplomat and presidential aide, has taken a larger role in sensitive foreign contacts, including talks involving the United States, even as Lavrov remains the public face of the foreign ministry.
A newer figure in this layer is Alexei Dyumin. A former presidential bodyguard who later commanded special forces, helped oversee the 2014 operation in Crimea, and served as governor of Tula, he is now a presidential aide and secretary of the State Council. He has been given responsibility for parts of the military-industrial complex and is frequently named in speculation about succession. Putin has promoted several former adjutants into politics precisely because they are known quantities. Dmitry Mironov, another former close aide, has become a key personnel officer for the security services. Loyalty proven in the corridor still matters more than a public following.
Money and media sit with a different set of old friends. Yuri Kovalchuk, often called Putin’s personal banker, controls Bank Rossiya, a large stake in the insurer SOGAZ, and National Media Group. He is treated as an informal adviser on politics and information. His son Boris heads the Accounts Chamber. Igor Sechin, a former Putin chief of staff from the St. Petersburg years, runs Rosneft and remains one of the most powerful men in the energy state. Sergei Chemezov, a Dresden colleague, heads Rostec, the giant defence-industrial conglomerate. Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, childhood judo partners of Putin, built fortunes on state construction contracts, including the bridge to Crimea. Gennady Timchenko is another long-time energy ally. These men are not independent oligarchs of the 1990s type. They are managers of assets that exist at the pleasure of the Kremlin.
Family has become more visible. Anna Tsivileva, a cousin once removed of the president, is deputy defence minister and state secretary of the ministry, with responsibility for military social payments and veterans. Her husband, Sergei Tsivilev, is energy minister. Dmitry Patrushev sits in the government. The children of Kovalchuk and Patrushev have been placed in posts of similar rank, a careful balance that prevents any one clan from looking like the heir. Putin’s own daughters, Maria Vorontsova and Katerina Tikhonova, remain largely out of public office. Ramzan Kadyrov, the ruler of Chechnya, is not a St. Petersburg friend but occupies a special category: a regional strongman with his own armed force and an unusually large family network in official posts.
The circle is ageing. Several of its most trusted members are in their seventies. The death of Sergei Ivanov, another old Putin associate, in 2026 sharpened the comparison with the late Brezhnev elite: a leadership that trusts only those it has known for decades and is reluctant to hand real power to a younger generation it does not know. That caution has a cost. It leaves the system thin at the top and dependent on men whose health and energy are finite.
The war has also changed the rules of loyalty. Membership of the inner circle once implied a kind of immunity. That is no longer automatic. In June 2026 the arrest of Ilya Traber, a St. Petersburg businessman whose career stretched back to Putin’s time as deputy mayor, was read as a warning. Long personal history no longer protects anyone who is judged insufficiently committed to the war or to the current distribution of assets. Sanctions, fuel shortages, and the redistribution of seized businesses have raised the stakes inside the elite. Clans compete for shrinking resources. The president remains the arbiter, but the court around him is more anxious than it was before 2022.
What holds the group together is not a shared programme so much as a shared dependence. The siloviki supply coercion and a narrative of encirclement. The technocrats keep the budget and the regions functioning. The St. Petersburg friends manage cash, contracts, and television. Relatives and former bodyguards fill the gaps with people the president believes he can predict. Putin balances them so that no single clan — Patrushev, Kovalchuk, Sechin, Rotenberg, Chemezov — becomes strong enough to dictate terms.
That is the who’s who of Putin’s Russia in 2026: an ageing, personal, and increasingly nervous court. The titles on the Security Council list matter. The men who have known the president for thirty or forty years still matter more.
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