![\"What](\"https:\/\/img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net\/tenant\/amp\/entityid\/AA1nL6Pq.img?w=534&h=300&m=6&x=624&y=887&s=1073&d=1073\" "\\"What")
<\/div>\nW<\/span>hen the\u00a0Yellowstone\u00a0supervolcano erupts<\/a>, it will annihilate all life on the North American continent. Siberia will become one of the safest places on Earth\u2014which is yet another reason \u201cthe Anglo-Saxon elites\u201d want to capture the region from Russia.<\/p>\n So\u00a0says<\/a>\u00a0Nikolai Patrushev, the second-most powerful man in Moscow. Currently the head of Russia\u2019s Security Council, Patrushev has been a colleague of Vladimir Putin\u2019s since the two served in the Leningrad KGB in the 1970s and is now the president\u2019s confidant and top adviser. A general of the army and a former director of the FSB\u2014the successor agency to the Soviet KGB\u2014Patrushev is also the de facto overlord of the country\u2019s other secret services. Among Kremlin courtiers, he alone appears licensed to speak for Putin on strategic matters, including nuclear weapons, the war in Ukraine, and Russia\u2019s view of the U.S., Europe, and NATO.<\/p>\n In Patrushev\u2019s telling, the West has been maligning and bullying Russia for half a millennium. As early as the 16th century,\u00a0\u201cRussophobic\u201d Western historians<\/a> besmirched Russia\u2019s first czar, Ivan IV\u2014a mass murderer and sadist better known as Ivan the Terrible. Patrushev insists that Ivan is merely a victim of a concocted \u201cblack legend\u201d that \u201cportrayed him as a tyrant.\u201d<\/p>\n The fall of the mighty Soviet Union made the country a softer target for the Western plotters, and the United States strove to exploit the opportunity by forcing Russia<\/a>\u00a0to give up its \u201csovereignty, national consciousness, culture, and an independent foreign and domestic policy.\u201d The conspiracy\u2019s final objectives are Russia\u2019s dismemberment, the elimination of the\u00a0Russian language<\/a>, the country\u2019s removal from the geopolitical map, and its confinement to the borders of the Duchy of Muscovy, a small medieval realm.<\/p>\n In Patrushev\u2019s world, the U.S.\u00a0invents new viruses<\/a>\u00a0in biological-weapons labs to annihilate the peoples of \u201cobjectionable states,\u201d and the COVID-19 virus \u201ccould have been created\u201d by the Pentagon with the assistance of several of the largest transnational\u00a0pharmaceutical firms<\/a>\u00a0and the \u201cClinton, Rockefeller, Soros, and Biden foundations.\u201d<\/p>\n Patrushev\u2019s greatest current fixation is\u00a0\u201call this story with Ukraine\u201d<\/a>\u2014a confrontation supposedly \u201cengineered in Washington.\u201d In 2014, by his account, the U.S. plotted the Maidan Revolution in Kyiv\u2014a\u00a0\u201ccoup d\u2019\u00e9tat\u201d<\/a>\u2014that pushed out a pro-Moscow president and sought to fill Ukrainians with \u201cthe hatred of everything Russian.\u201d Today, Ukraine is no more than a testing ground for aging U.S. armaments as well as a place whose natural resources the West would prefer to exploit mercilessly\u2014and \u201cwithout the indigenous population.\u201d Preserving Ukraine as a sovereign state is not in America\u2019s plans, Patrushev claims. Afraid of attacking Russia directly, \u201cNATO instructors herd Ukrainian boys to certain death\u201d in the trenches. Indeed, the West is essentially perpetrating an \u201cannihilation\u201d of the Ukrainians, whereas Russia\u2019s goal is to \u201cput an end to the West\u2019s bloody experiment to destroy the fraternal people of Ukraine.\u201d<\/p>\n This is the picture of the world that Patrushev serves up to Putin. The adviser provides\u00a0\u201ca framework\u201d<\/a>\u00a0for the Russian president\u2019s vision, the prominent Russian political sociologist Nikolai Petrov has argued.<\/p>\n Patrushev said last May that Western special services were training terrorists and saboteurs for \u201ccommitting crimes on the territory of our country.\u201d Russian civilians have suffered because of that view. Weeks before Islamic State terrorists attacked a music hall in a Moscow suburb late last month, U.S. intelligence officials told the Russian government<\/a>\u00a0about a threat to the venue. Putin dismissed the U.S.\u2019s warning as\u00a0\u201cobvious blackmail\u201d<\/a>\u00a0and a \u201cplot to scare and destabilize our society.\u201d<\/p>\n More and more a policy maker in his own right, he frequently stands in for Putin in essential negotiations with top allies, reducing Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to ceremonial duties and the signing of meaningless treaties. As the exiled Russian journalist Maxim Glikin has pointed out, Patrushev is where foreign policy meets war<\/a>. This nexus expands inexorably.<\/p>\n Patrushev flew to Tehran in November of that year to negotiate the sale of Iranian drones<\/a>. He has traveled to Latin America to meet with President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro of Venezuela and President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua. With Cuban President Miguel D\u00edaz-Canel, Patrushev discussed \u201cAmerica-orchestrated color revolutions<\/a>,\u201d the \u201cdestructive activities\u201d of nongovernment organizations, and the\u00a0dispatching of Cuban troops<\/a>\u00a0to Belarus \u201cfor training.\u201d<\/p>\n In October 2009, he announced in an interview with the national newspaper Izvestia<\/i>\u00a0that Russian nuclear weapons were not just for use in a \u201clarge-scale\u201d war. Contrary to the restriction spelled out in the\u00a02000 version of Russian military doctrine<\/a>, Patrushev proposed that Russia\u2019s nukes could be deployed in a conventional regional conflict or even a\u00a0local<\/a>\u00a0one. He also thought that in a \u201ccritical situation,\u201d a\u00a0preventive<\/a>\u00a0strike against an aggressor \u201cmay not be excluded.\u201d Four months later,\u00a0Putin signed<\/a>\u00a0a revision of the doctrine. As Patrushev had suggested, a conflict would no longer have to be \u201clarge-scale\u201d for Russia to reach for its atomic bombs and missiles. (Patrushev\u2019s agitation for preventive nuclear attacks has yet to make the text of the doctrine, but Putin\u2019s blunt nuclear blackmail in the past two years suggests that Patrushev may eventually get his wish.)<\/p>\n In its efforts to understand Russia\u2019s intentions, the United States has tried to get to know Patrushev better. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan\u2019s first call to Patrushev was\u00a0on January 25, 2021<\/a>, five days after Joe Biden\u2019s inauguration. Sullivan and Patrushev would go on to speak on the phone five more times, in addition to meeting\u00a0in Reykjavik<\/a>\u00a0in May of that year. After their conversation in November, according to\u00a0The New York Times<\/i>, Patrushev reported discussing ways of \u201cimproving the atmosphere<\/a>\u00a0of Russian-American relations.\u201d A joint statement indicated that Sullivan and Patrushev had discussed \u201cincreasing trust<\/a>\u00a0between the two countries.\u201d<\/p>\n This would have been all the more gratifying because of the Kremlin\u2019s conviction that time was on Russia\u2019s side. In Patrushev\u2019s view, the West is slowly expiring. European civilization has no future, he has said. Its politics are in the \u201cdeepest moral and intellectual\u00a0decline<\/a>\u201d; it is headed for the \u201cdeepest economic and political crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n America\u2019s downfall is also nigh, portended not only by ashes at Yellowstone but by the nation\u2019s basic geography. The United States is but \u201ca patchwork quilt\u201d that could \u201ceasily come\u00a0apart at the seams<\/a>.\u201d Furthermore, Patrushev told the\u00a0main government newspaper<\/a>\u00a0Rossiyskaya Gazeta<\/i>, the American South could be drifting toward Mexico, whose lands the U.S. grabbed in 1848: \u201cBeyond doubt,\u201d America\u2019s \u201csouthern neighbors\u201d will reclaim the stolen lands, and a passive U.S. citizenry will do nothing to preserve the \u201cwholeness\u201d of the country.<\/p>\n In this and many other ways, Patrushev\u2019s worldview will seem utterly alien to most Americans. But his enormous influence underscores that Putin is far from the only force preventing Russian politics from reorienting toward a more liberal regime.<\/p>\n Patrushev, who turns 73 in July, is a year older than the president. Yet should he survive Putin, Patrushev is certain to deploy his secret army to help guide the transition and may well have a shot at coming out on top. As he likes to say, truth is on his side<\/a>.<\/p>\n