His close associates include the Siloviki - the security men around Putin, most of whom rose up through the ranks of the KGB as he did and have a hawkish, Cold War mindset.
Perhaps the most powerful of them all is Nikolai Patrushev, head of Russia's Security Council.
"We can imagine that he delivers to Putin on an everyday basis reports about hostile American influence or Western influence inside of Russia, and how Western secret services are trying to undermine political stability," says Tatiana Stanovaya, a security expert and founder of political think-tank R.Politik.Sergei Naryshkin is the head of the SVR, Russia's Foreign Intelligence Agency.
Naryshkin was publicly humiliated by the Russian president, stumbling to find the right words to give his support to independence for the separatist republics in Eastern Ukraine.They go on widely-publicised hunting and shooting expeditions to Siberia together.Shoigu is not a military man by training but since his appointment to the Defence Ministry in 2012 he has overseen Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and its intervention in Syria.
If the US is the enemy, the worst-case scenario of NATO troops and strategic weapons hypothetically positioned in Ukraine was perhaps the working strategy he will have been tasked to work on. There are also constantly circulating rumours, tricky to confirm, that he has been looking to retire for years.Yuri Kovalchuk is a Russian oligarch with family and personal ties to the president.They met when Putin was deputy mayor of what was then Leningrad, modern-day St Petersburg.
Given the interconnected nature of the Russian elites though, bound together by financial and family ties - marriages, mistresses and money - it may be unlikely we'll see elite defections.
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