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how was his close guard composed?

The topic of the day. KGB veterans, childhood friends, St. Petersburg City Hall veterans… Many personalities make up the base of the Russian president’s faithful. For years, the entourage of the master of the Kremlin has participated in erecting one of the most controversial men in the world at the pinnacle of power and wealth. Today, they are hundreds to be the subject of sanctions for weakening the Putin system.

Why are we talking about it ? How was Vladimir Putin’s close guard composed? Who are his relatives?

Analyse. “Putin, while making new contacts, also remains faithful to his childhood friends, who in principle did not predestine to become very important people, nor very rich, like his former buddies during judo, like people , who, like him, participated in the construction of a cottage village on the edge of a lake.It is his friends that he is sure of, because they were not in the political game from the start. Their loyalty is not to a group, their loyalty is not to a party, their allegiance goes to one man, Putin, that rewards them, beyond all imagination. We still find them in his entourage, they are all multi-millionaires, sometimes billionaires. Among them, there are also people who manage his fortune”, explains Galia Ackerman, specialist in the Russian and post-Soviet world.

“Corruption, enrichment certainly began for many of them, already at the end of the Soviet era and it was all going to work in Saint Petersburg from 1990-1991, when Putin landed in the new Mayor of Saint-Petersburg. This is where it all begins since we are entering the great period of privatization of Soviet companies and heritage, this will be the role of Putin and it is there that he will build his close guard from former childhood comrades, from the KGB but also those with whom he will work in Saint Petersburg and they will carry out the privatizations and enrich themselves considerably. (…) It is not a clan, neither in the singular nor in the plural, it is men who, little by little, work together to capture public institutions such as bodies, administrations, large companies in the process of privatization”, add Marie Mendras, political scientist and professor at Sciences Po, researcher at the CNRS and author of the book The other side of power at Odile Jacob.

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