Not quite. This is more or less publicly known but there is a select "club" of people in Russia called the "Lake Club" ("Ozero"), named after a fancy area in which an entourage of Putin built their "dachas". An entourage built on friends from St Petesburg and from his years in the KGB. A notable one is Yury Kovalchuk, possibly the second most powerful man in Putin's Russia. He along with Putin and his closed circle planned the aggression to Ukraine.

I guess what I want to say is that this war is "a team effort", the problem is that is a dysfunctional team that lacks a counterbalance in opinions and generates only the same old cold-war mafia-style ideas.