“Putin was my mistake. Getting rid of him is my responsibility.”

It’s clear by the time the character Boris Berezovsky utters that chilling line in the new Broadway play “Patriots” that any attempt to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rise would be futile, perhaps even fatal.

The show, which opened for a limited run in New York on April 22, stars Tony and Emmy-nominated actor Michael Stuhlbarg as Berezovsky, a larger-than-life oligarch whose billions buy him into the highest ranks of Russian power after the fall of the Soviet Union. When asked by President Boris Yeltsin to find a successor to lead the fledgling nation, Berezovsky taps Putin, a former KGB agent and ex-mayor of St. Petersburg who few knew well.