Peeling back the onion: How the influential family of Vladimir Putin’s right-hand man avoids public scrutiny of its finances

Nikolay Patrushev is widely credited with being a Kremlin ideologue whose Russian World sympathies led directly to the invasion of Ukraine. A St. Petersburg native like Vladimir Putin, he was at one point the Russian president’s patron and the man responsible for bringing Putin to Moscow in the late 1990s.

Since then, he has never been far from Putin’s side, and found himself elevated by his protégé’s meteoric rise from FSB director to prime minister and ultimately, to president.