When Vladimir Putin ascended to the Russian presidency in 2000, he immediately set about assembling a core of loyalists.
Almost everyone in the Kremlin's inner circle had deep connections to the new leader.
Most hailed from Putin's hometown of St Petersburg or were colleagues from the old days at the Soviet-era spy agency, the KGB.
They were men he could trust — a quality Putin valued most.
To Russian journalist and Putin critic Masha Gessen, his government has long resembled a Mafia family.
"The patriarch and his family have only two goals: accumulating wealth and concentrating power," she wrote in 2016.
But one man stood apart from the others in Putin's urban elite family.
Sergei Shoigu was born in a small impoverished town close to the Mongolian-Russian border.
His mother was Ukrainian, while his father was part of the Tuva community, an ethnic group indigenous to Siberia.
He dreamed of escaping his isolated home for the hustle and bustle of Moscow.
"Sergei Shoigu likes to tell how his childhood dream was to be a truck driver: someone completely free and dependent only on himself," Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar wrote in All The Kremlin's Men.
Shoigu worked as a civil engineer and set about climbing the ladder of the local branch of the Communist Party.
He arrived in Moscow just as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990 and new president Boris Yeltsin was hastily assembling a cabinet.
"He rapidly rose to prominence in the early 1990s as an all-around troubleshooter, becoming the minister of emergency situations, a cabinet-level position that he himself invented," Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov, nonresident senior fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis, wrote earlier this year.
By the time Putin succeeded Yeltsin nearly a decade later, Shoigu had made himself a star of Russian politics.
At every disaster that struck Russia, Shoigu was there, dressed in camouflage gear and trailed by a group of camera-wielding journalists.
But without a long history to bond him to the new leader, Shoigu needed to get creative if he wanted to remain in the upper echelons of power.
How the Kremlin's outsider used a puppy and a photo shoot to bond with Putin
First, Shoigu gave Putin, a known dog lover, a black labrador puppy called Konni Leod Paulgrave, or "Konni" for short.
While Putin has owned up to four dogs at one time, Konni was clearly his most cherished companion.
She regularly appeared at his feet during live televised addresses and he scolded reporters for feeding her biscuits.
Putin once interrupted a security briefing to ask the deputy prime minister if he could arrange a special collar for Konni that would allow her master to track her movements by satellite.
And Angela Merkel accused Putin of exploiting her lifelong phobia of dogs by allowing Konni to trot into their 2007 meeting. Fortunately for the German chancellor, Konni curled up at Merkel's feet and promptly fell asleep.
After giving Putin his treasured pet, Shoigu used his rugged upbringing and knowledge of the outdoors to further charm the Russian president.
Together, the two men appeared in a string of photo ops, dressed in matching cowboy hats as they collected mushrooms, marvelled at the landscape and dined side by side on fur-lined benches under the trees.
Putin wanted to build himself a hyper masculine cult of personality, and Shoigu was his enthusiastic art director.
"He arranged Putin's fishing and hunting expeditions across Russia's rugged terrain, including the first one where he posed topless," Zygar wrote.
"It is said that Shoigu even 'directed' the photo shoot where Putin is riding bare-chested on a horse, choosing the cowboy hat and the tree he should climb."
Their bond forged, Putin would elevate Shoigu to the post of defence minister in 2012 even though he had no military experience and was unpopular with Russian generals.
Considered the "heir apparent" for years, Shoigu basked in the warm glow of being Putin's favourite.
But like every member of the family, he learned how cold it could be when the patriarch turned on them.
Surviving inside the toxic clique that is the Kremlin
In the early years of Putin's presidency, the power dynamics within the Kremlin were shifting, paving the way for the toxic infighting that would last for decades to come.
Shoigu, then minister of civil defence and emergency situations, had given Putin an arm up on his rise to the top and was rewarded with a hefty boost to the forces under his charge.
The Emergency Ministry took control over Russia's fire service, which included handing out fire safety certificates to every building in Russia — a lucrative opportunity for officers open to bribery.
The transfer also handily shrank the responsibilities of one of Shoigu's closest rivals, interior minister Boris Gryzlov, an ally of Putin's former-KGB-colleague-turned-spymaster Nikolai Patrushev.
Gryzlov and Shoigu had been jostling for position within the United Russia party, a pro-Putin amalgamation of the Unity faction — formerly headed by Shoigu — and Fatherland-All Russia party.
But eventually, Shoigu stood aside to make way for Gryzlov to become the new leader of the fledgling party.
Gryzlov soon found renewed focus in cracking down on corruption ahead of the 2003 elections, setting his sights on the "gang of werewolves in epaulettes" inside his own department.
Sure enough, among his top scalps was Shoigu's key security chief.
"It was rumoured that Shoigu's subordinate testified against his boss and even admitted during his interrogation that aircraft belonging to the ministry had been used to import drugs to Russia from Tajikistan," Zygar wrote in All The Kremlin's Men.
"The rumours remained just that, but for a moment Shoigu looked vulnerable."
But in the intervening decades, it seems Shoigu's loyalty to Putin allowed him to skate through the numerous internal political crises and Kremlin power grabs relatively unscathed.
That is, until now.
The face of an incompetent military
Since Putin first marched his troops across the border, Shoigu has become a central figure in Moscow's military campaign in Ukraine and one of the public faces of the war.
Indeed, US officials believe the Putin loyalist was one of only a few people who knew about the Russian president's plans to invade in the lead-up to February 24.
Shoigu's political future appeared to be intrinsically tied to Russia's success on the battlefield, fuelling rumours the Defence Minister might be in trouble when Russia's incompetence was laid bare in its failed offensive on Kyiv.
Speculation kicked into overdrive when Shoigu disappeared from public view on March 11, after telling his boss the war was going to plan.
Some claimed, without any evidence, that he had resigned, while others speculated he was in failing health or had been punished by Putin for failing to capture the capital.
But Shoigu resurfaced some 12 days later, appearing in a short video meeting with top military officials to discuss weapons for the campaign, which was aired by state media.
It's still not clear why he disappeared, though officials claimed he was simply too busy overseeing the war effort to do media.
"The defence minister has a lot on his mind right now. A special military operation is underway. Now is not really the time for media activity," Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters at the time.
While his disappearance was downplayed, observers speculate an epic power struggle is now playing out inside the Kremlin as the war drags on.
Shoigu, once seen as a natural successor to his boss, now faces a menacing set of opponents.
"The war has ... set in motion a public race of the successors," Russian journalist Andrey Pertsev wrote for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"In recent years, political manoeuvring in Russia was kept in the shadows, but in this new era, loud proclamations and high-visibility political gesturing are again the norm.
"It is as though an active election campaign is already under way, with bureaucrats and functionaries within the ruling party doing their best to get into the limelight and even attacking one another."
It also appears as if the war has driven a wedge between the Defence Minister and his boss.
"There are reports that Putin is very disappointed in how Shoigu prepared for this war, how he carried it out," Russian political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya told the Washington Post in May.
Now, as the Kremlin searches for scapegoats for its floundering campaign, Shoigu's position appears to be increasingly vulnerable.
Kremlin allies turn on Shoigu
Two of Vladimir Putin's top army lieutenants and close allies of the leader publicly criticised Russia's military command last week after its troops lost the bastion of Lyman.
With western parts of Ukraine's Luhansk region now under threat, Chechen boss Ramzan Kadyrov claimed he had raised the possibility of a defeat at Lyman with Valery Gerasimov weeks before.
But the chief of Russia's general staff, who was appointed by Shoigu in 2012, had apparently dismissed the idea.
"I do not know what the defence ministry reports to the supreme commander-in-chief [Putin], but in my personal opinion, more drastic measures should be taken," Kadyrov said.
The founder of the Wagner militia group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, then praised the Chechen leader for his comments, before adding "all these bastards should be sent barefoot to the front with automatic guns".
The comments were significant given public criticism of the war has been taboo, particularly among the top brass.
They also offer insights into the elite's growing frustration with the war effort.
Just last week, a Russian-installed official in Ukraine said the Defence Minister's performance has been so shameful, he should consider killing himself.
"Indeed, many say: if they were a defence minister who had allowed such a state of affairs, they could, as officers, have shot themselves," said Kirill Stremousov, the Russian-installed deputy head of the annexed Kherson region.
So far, Shoigu has been able to withstand criticism as one of only a select few within Putin's inner circle whose loyalty can be counted on, according to observers.
"Even if Shoigu isn't happy with what is happening, he'll always be loyal to Putin and do his job," a former defence official told the Guardian.
"Putin knows he can fully trust him."
He also serves a purpose, according to academic and author Mark Galeotti, in helping to deflect the blame from Putin.
"Shoigu's job now is to be Putin's bulletproof vest," the head of Russia-focused consultancy Mayak Intelligence told NBC News.
"At the moment, his main value is exactly that he soaks up the criticism, which otherwise would inevitably be heading Putin's way."
But as criticism mounts, Putin may soon need to make a difficult decision: remove his close ally or keep him and risk accepting blame for Russia's failed war effort.
Where does this leave Sergei Shoigu?
The decision about what to do with his defence chief may be out of Putin's hands.
Last month the State Duma announced it was considering summoning Shoigu to face a private grilling over the lightning advance by Ukrainian forces in Kharkiv.
Sergei Mironov said his party had proposed the session "so that the deputies can speak with him behind closed doors and ask all the questions that interest us and the citizens".
While Shoigu has yet to face the music, there are ongoing meetings to discuss "the situation with the supply of the Russian army", and the pressure is on to find a political scalp to pin the blame upon should renewed efforts fail.
According to academics Soldatov and Borogan, Shoigu "lacks the proper military training to understand that a battlefield victory, no matter how impressive, can sometimes lead to an even larger political defeat".
Left to his own devices, Shoigu is unlikely to remove himself from the mess he has made.
However, one former defence official told The Guardian, "I truly believe he would be happy to get sacked right now".
Now standing virtually alone on the fringes of Putin's inner circle, Sergei Shoigu is faced with a conundrum that echoes a hypothetical once put to him during a TV broadcast in 2006.
"What would you do if you were on a plane that was falling from the sky?" a teenaged bystander asked.
"Nothing. It would keep falling regardless," came the reply.
