PARIS — At a cafe on the Place des Vosges, Natalia Gevorkyan is picking at a salade verte and thinking about betrayal.

It’s a central theme in the worldview of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president and a man who once spent many hours telling her of his life and his credo. It was natural for a KGB officer to suspect betrayal all around him, she says, and though Putin left the agency nearly two decades ago, he has never shaken its particular view of human nature. Yet today, an air of suspicion seems to permeate the Kremlin more than at any time since he came to power.

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