————-

Moscow
Present Day
————

There is an elite unit deep within the Administratsiya Prezidenta Rossiyskoy Federatsii, (Presidential Administration of Russia), called the Federal’naya sluzhba okhrany Rossiyskoy Federatsii – Federal Protective Service (FGS).

The FGS mirrors America’s Secret Service and has the same job – to keep the leader of the nation alive.

Here are those attributes of the FGS that are similar……

The tools of the trade – the bulletproof limos, vests and briefcases, electronic surveillance, eavesdropping and signal jammers, high-power sniper rifles, grenade launchers, shoulder-fired surface to air or anti personnel missiles, multiple rings of agents each surrounding the President at all times, casing and bolting down of neighbourhoods long before a visit, et al.

Like the Secret Service, FGS agents are experts at many things – hand-to-hand combat, martial arts and standing for hours outside, in extreme cold as well as extreme heat, remaining alert and sharp.

Those things about the FGS that are vastly different from the American Secret Service are….

The FGS is answerable on paper to the director of the Presidential Administration but in reality only to Putin and no one else. FGS agents are wealthy, continuously endowed with cash and property worth millions by Russia’s equivalent of the Saudi “sovereign wealth fund”. Just as the Saudi fund is solely administered by Prince MBS, so is the Russian fund, by Putin and constantly topped up by his oligarch brigade. Estimates suggest that the Putin wealth fund owns assets worth over a trillion dollars.

On retirement at the age of 35, agents of the FGS are given plum positions such as regional governor, federal minister, special services commander or presidential administrator, where the opportunities for grift are infinite.

A 2018 exposé by Russia’s Novaya Gazeta and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project revealed how a giant Soviet-era poultry farm and factory outside Moscow was appropriated and its valuable land divvied up among high-ranking officers in the FGS. Among those who benefitted from the scam were three former Putin bodyguards who were recorded flanking him during an official trip to Helsinki in 1999.

Putin has six rings of these agents surrounding him at all times and even multiple agents planted in crowds. In comparison, the American President has only two rings of agents around him.

American Secret Service agents are not given cash or property. An agent is covered by the FERS (Federal Employee Retirement Service) and is eligible to a voluntary 30-year period of employment. The agent starts at around $32000/yr and can end with $190000/yr if he or she retires as the Director of the Secret Service.

The above is as far as my information goes. I have no idea if things have changed with Trump in power.

Secret Service agents have no plum appointments lined up on retirement and as to the patsy (a.k.a body double), to the best of my knowledge an American President does not use one. I doubt if there are any suicidal guys willing to act as a body double for Donald Trump.

Putin’s personal security costs the Russian exchequer $30billion a year, while America spends just $3billion to keep its President alive.

---

Now, here’s the thing. In spite of all the expense and effort at securing his safety, Putin will not get to see his last wish, that he may die a world changer. He had wanted to see all the ‘prodigal sons’ (the breakaway republics) back in the fold and the Russian Empire at the head of half the civilized world. Even more than that, he always wanted to go peacefully in his own bed when the time comes. 

The end, when it does come, is sudden and quiet, with two sounds not louder than soft coughs. It catches him by complete surprise, his dimming eyes glazed, with hurt and betrayal.

---

The Russian President had spent the night at Novo-Ogaryovo, his official dacha west of Moscow, on the Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Highway. Now the sun is barely peeking out over the firs in the distance and he is already at his desk in the den, leafing through the press briefing that he is scheduled to deliver this afternoon about what had been achieved at the recent summit with Trump in Riyadh.

The briefing is, as the title suggests, brief. The President hates flowery prose.

There is a discrete knock and his major-domo, Volodya, a Spetsnaz veteran and his judo partner, enters quietly, closing the tall oak doors behind him, as he balances a tray in his right hand. He is a lefty, a fact that the President sometimes forgets on the mat.

Volodya had broken his ribs twice while practicing the ‘harai goshi’, (a judo sweep throw) with Putin, but he would follow his master blindly and unquestioningly. Likewise, Vladimir Vladimirovich trusts Volodya with his life and has made sure that he and his family want for nothing.

Little is known about Volodya outside of the President’s closest circle of aides, but of one single thing there is no doubt in anybody’s mind – that Volodya is to Putin what Martin Bormann had been, to Hitler. Only, in his case he had the same name as his boss – Volodya is short for Volodymyr which is the Ukrainian way of saying Vladimir, a word that means “Ruler of the World”.

There is only one man more powerful than the FSG and that is Volodymyr Antonenko. Of course, it is always a roll of the dice in dictatorships. You are powerful as long as your man is in power. He goes and those multitudes with grudges, the long knives, will be out to get even and you might find yourself on a train to the Kolyma Labour camp with a one-way ticket.

There is only one way you can remain untouchable in today’s Russia – if you are awarded the nation’s highest honour….. Hero of the Russian Federation. A purge at that level would reflect badly on the leadership. 

Volodya is in the running for that honor.

—————————-

Even less known is the fact that Volodymyr is not his real name.

Volodya had actually been born Rustem Akhmetov, the only son of a certain Fedir Akhmetov, a Crimean Muslim Tatar, in a tiny hamlet called Rozovyi in the wilderness just outside Alushta, a coastal Crimean town of 30000, 100 miles east of Sebastopol, Ukraine. Crimean Muslims were generally progressive but by the time the son was born, Fedir had embraced the rabid Wahhabist Muslim version of the faith.

The match that lit the fire of Fedir Akhmetov’s extremism had its origins in the dying days of the Second World War….

For generations, the Akhmetov clan had been living in peaceful contentment in Rozovyi when, in late 1944, Fedir Akhmetov became one of the 190,000 Muslim Tatars who were forcibly rounded up, removed from Crimea and sent by Stalin on a week-long 3500 mile cattle car ride to be resettled in the Uzbekistan S.S.R. All his earthly possessions, his land and his home, were snatched by the Bolshevik apparatchiks.

It was an ethnic cleansing operation that Crimean historians call “Surgunlik”.

An avowed atheist, Stalin was concerned about more Muslim enclaves forming on the USSR’s western borders after the war ended. Already there were Islamist Iran, Iraq and Turkey – a bit too many. His childhood memories of Russia’s continuous bloody conflicts with the Ottoman Empire and later, Hitler’s desperate cozying up with the Islamic nations of the Levant to save the Nazis, were still fresh in the dictator’s memory.

Compared to the idyllic life in Crimea, the refugee camp in Uzbekistan was a hellhole, but the Akhmetovs somehow survived. Then, in 1986, after the Mikhail Gorbachev kindled “perestroika (reform) and glasnost (transparency)”, those memes became the zeitgeist. Under perestroika, Fedir and his family were allowed to return to Ukraine, this time to Donetsk, a mid-sized Russian-majority town in the east.

Deeply resentful of the way that he and his family had been treated, Fedir Akhmetov set about formulating a plan as the train carrying them back chugged through the Uzbek countryside.

First, Akhmetov decided that for the future prosperity of his family, he needed to shed his Muslim Tatar identity. He believed that his version of the Quran allowed him to masquerade as a non-Muslim if there was a higher goal ahead. He shed his Muslim identity quietly and on arrival at Donetsk, registered with the city council as an erstwhile orthodox Christian, Fedir Antonenko, now an atheist. You could get away with makeovers those chaotic days. Then, with the help of a newly acquired friend who happened to be an apparatchik, he got himself a job as a staffer at the Donetsk office of the Soviet external intelligence agency, the KGB.

An intensely loyal and hard worker who minded his own business, Akhmetov was well regarded by his superiors. A string of transfers and promotions within the KGB followed, until his final posting in East Berlin, as Chief of Station for Department V Operations, the Mokroye Delo (known in the CIA as the Black Ops or Wet Affairs – covering assassinations, kidnappings and sabotage).

All through his rise through the ranks of the KGB, Fedir Akhmetov, had managed to hide his true identity. It had been possible only because of the immediate post-war chaos

Sometime in the late 1980s, when on a routine visit to Dresden, Fedir rubbed shoulders with a diminutive, shifty, ferret-eyed man, a 30-yr old KGB agent like himself, a man who spoke in a soft, hesitant voice.

The agent was named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

It is said that they immediately took to each other.

————————————

[It’s time for my date with the Stella Artois sisters. Toodle-oo. Watch out for Part-2]