The fall of ‘Putin’s point man’ Meduza’s Andrey Pertsev charts the political demise of Dmitry Kozak, the only senior Russian official believed to oppose the war against Ukraine
Last week, Vladimir Putin signed a decree accepting the “voluntary” resignation of Kremlin Deputy Chief of Staff Dmitry Kozak. Before taking up this high-level post, Kozak served as Russia’s deputy prime minister for 12 years, overseeing preparations for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and shaping Kremlin policy toward Kyiv and several unrecognized “republics” in the post-Soviet space. Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev recounts how Kozak, the only senior Russian official thought to oppose the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, fell out of Putin’s good graces but only managed to step down three and a half years into the war.
The lawyer from St. Petersburg
On August 19, 1991, a state of emergency was declared in the city of Leningrad. What would become known as the August Putsch was underway. A group of senior state officials — the self-proclaimed “State Committee on the State of Emergency” (GKChP) — had launched an attempt to seize control of the USSR.
In Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Colonel General Viktor Samsonov led the charge. The commander of the Leningrad Military District, Samsonov, issued the order on the state of emergency and imposed censorship on the press, dispatching political officers from the Leningrad Military District’s headquarters to the editorial offices of local newspapers, TV broadcasters, and radio stations. Meanwhile, Admiral Viktor Khramtsov, a member of the Leningrad City Council, appeared before his fellow deputies as the GKChP’s representative.
The Leningrad City Council was dominated by supporters of democratic reforms — and they immediately pushed back. According to Alexander Vinnikov, who sat on the council, one of his fellow deputies walked right up to Khramtsov and “just punched him in the face.” The council’s chairman then demanded that Khramtsov produce the “written order on the creation of the Leningrad GKChP.” When the admiral replied that there wasn’t one, the chairman shrugged and said, “That means this is all illegal.”
But it was someone else who enumerated just how illegal the attempted coup was. “The head of the legal department at the time was Dmitry Kozak, who listed all of the articles of the Constitution that had been violated and said there was no question of legality,” Vinnikov recalled.
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A graduate of the law faculty at Leningrad State University, Kozak had worked as a public prosecutor and, during Perestroika, as a lawyer for commercial firms. After the Soviet Union’s collapse, he went on to work in the office of St. Petersburg’s mayor, Anatoly Sobchak. It was there that he met another lawyer: Vladimir Putin.
At the time, Putin was Sobchak’s advisor and the head of his office’s Committee for External Relations. “All important city hall employees had contact with Kozak in one way or another. In those days, you couldn’t get anything done without competent legal counsel. Kozak is a lawman and worked conscientiously. He and Putin became close, both as lawyers and as graduates of the same university,” said a St. Petersburg politician, who spoke to Meduza on condition of anonymity.
Kozak served as the head of Sobchak’s Legal Committee, which involved representing the mayor in the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly. According to politician Sergey Mironov, who was the assembly’s deputy speaker at the time, Kozak “rigorously screened” the legislators’ initiatives, checking them for compliance with federal and regional laws.
After Sobchak’s defeat in the 1996 elections, Kozak — unlike Putin — stayed on to work for his successor, St. Petersburg Governor Vladimir Yakovlev. Two years later, he became the city’s deputy governor.
Putin’s point man
Kozak’s stint as St. Petersburg’s deputy governor was short-lived; unable to work with his new boss, he left the city administration in 1998. The following year, his former colleague Vladimir Putin — by then Russia’s prime minister — invited him to Moscow, offering him the role of chief of staff.
After Putin was elected to his first term as president in May 2000, he initially planned to make Kozak prosecutor general but changed his mind at the last minute without explanation. Instead, he made Kozak the deputy head of his administration. And in this post, Kozak would effectively become one of the main architects of Putin’s power vertical, overseeing reforms aimed at more clearly delimiting the powers of federal, regional, and municipal authorities.
This included municipal reforms that allowed for the selective elimination of mayoral elections, and in many cities, mayors were replaced by “city managers,” typically appointed through a competitive process controlled by the authorities. By the late 2000s, the authorities began making widespread use of this institution to prevent the opposition from winning direct elections.
Kozak briefly returned to government as chief of staff in 2004, but he was soon unexpectedly transferred to the post of presidential plenipotentiary envoy to Russia’s Southern Federal District, where his responsibilities included overseeing the distribution of federal funds to regions in the North Caucasus. At the time, journalists speculated that Kozak was either being exiled or positioned as Russia’s next prime minister and then, Putin’s successor. Both theories turned out to be incorrect.
In 2007, Kozak returned to the government as regional development minister and was immediately entrusted with Putin’s most important project: overseeing the construction for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. In early 2008, Kozak was promoted to deputy prime minister — a post he held until 2020.
During his 12 years as deputy prime minister, Kozak gained influence in many strategically important areas. Immediately after the 2014 Winter Olympics, he was tasked with “integrating” Crimea, which Russia had annexed from Ukraine, and later, with overseeing the fuel and energy sector.
Kozak also undertook other significant assignments from Putin that fell outside the scope of his official responsibilities. For example, during a political crisis in Moldova in 2019, he helped the pro-Russian Party of Socialists and the pro-European ACUM bloc to form a parliamentary coalition. As a result, Moldovan oligarch and Democratic Party leader Vladimir Plahotniuc, who remains wanted in both Moldova and Russia on multiple criminal charges, lost influence in the region. At the time, the Russian newspaper Kommersant wrote that Kozak had “reinvigorated Moldovan politics.”
A former government official familiar with Kozak called him “Putin’s point man,” saying the president entrusted him with issues that were “important and pressing here and now.” “He’s described as an anti-crisis manager — and rightly so. Kozak tries to resolve issues without making a bigger mess, by establishing a legal framework and taking into account not only the interests of the state, so to speak, but also those of its partners and even its opponents,” this source told Meduza.
After Kozak resigned along with the rest of the Russian Cabinet in January 2020, a source in the fuel and energy sector told Vedomosti that the outgoing deputy prime minister had “made a very strong impression.” “He figured things out, made decisions about what’s important, listened, and was ‘for everything good.’ At the same time, he didn’t push too hard,” the source said. Another source told the newspaper that Kozak was a “demanding” official who “tried to bring any undertaking to its logical conclusion.”
The man who said ‘no’ to Putin
After the entire Russian government resigned in 2020, Dmitry Kozak didn’t get a seat in the new Cabinet. Instead, he returned to the presidential administration as deputy chief of staff, and he was assigned to oversee the unrecognized Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” in eastern Ukraine. Kozak was also tasked with managing relations with Kyiv and maintaining contacts with other countries in the post-Soviet region.
According to one source, Kozak’s post in the presidential administration did not carry nearly the same level of influence as the one he had left. However, he was once again assigned responsibility for a matter that was “important to Putin.”
“[Incoming Prime Minister Mikhail] Mishustin didn’t want to see such a strong figure in his Cabinet. And the president needed someone who could at least try to resolve the crisis in Ukraine,” said the former government official familiar with Kozak.
However, a Meduza source close to the Putin administration believes there was another reason for Kozak’s demotion. According to this person, Kozak knew how to “say no” to Putin, criticize the president’s bad ideas, and put forward alternatives. And after more than two decades of ruling Russia, this was something Putin no longer desired. “The president had changed. He needed people who would say ‘yes’ and carry out his orders without question. Such an independent and powerful deputy prime minister in a key sector had become superfluous to Putin,” he suggested.
Both the source close to the Putin administration and a political strategist familiar with Kozak said that he quickly realized his new portfolio was “a mess.” And while Putin’s previous point man in Donbas, presidential aide Vladislav Surkov, had relished the chaos and sought to shore up Russia’s influence in the region, Kozak actually aimed to end the conflict. As Kommersant reported at the time: “For him [Kozak], the unresolved conflict in eastern Ukraine is a problem that diverts resources and prevents Moscow from normalizing relations with the West.”
By all appearances, the “independent-minded” Kozak disagreed with Putin about the future of the “republics” in Donbas. During a historic Security Council meeting three days before Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kozak complained that Moscow was spending “astronomical sums” on “humanitarian support [for these] territories” — a reality that, apparently, did not suit him. He then began discussing Donbas’s economic problems, but Putin abruptly interrupted him and requested an update on the “negotiation process over the Minsk Agreements.”
Meduza’s source close to the Putin administration said all the Security Council members realized that Putin was deciding to launch an all-out war. Kozak opposed the invasion.
The figurehead
On February 24, 2022, Putin sent troops over the border in a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That April, Meduza reported that Kozak, who opposed the invasion, had fallen “out of favor” with the president. “As a bureaucrat, Kozak advocated for continuing work within the Normandy format — the negotiations aimed at implementing the Minsk Agreements. He believed more time was needed and that some form of success could still be achieved. But by that point [Putin] was already on a different wavelength,” a high-ranking official told BBC News Russian that spring. Kozak, he added, “had effectively fallen from grace.”
The main consequence of Kozak’s downfall was the transfer of the Donbas portfolio to Putin’s domestic policy czar, Sergey Kiriyenko. As Meduza’s source close to the presidential administration explained, overseeing the “people’s republics” and managing relations with Ukraine had made up “the lion’s share of Kozak’s real powers.” In his words, “Overseeing Donetsk and Luhansk means control over the federal funds allocated to them. Where there’s money, there’s leverage. And there were simply no real negotiations with Ukraine.”
All that remained within Kozak’s responsibilities was the presidential administration’s engagement with other post-Soviet countries and oversight of Abkhazia and South Ossetia — two Russian-backed separatist regions in Georgia. The former government official told Meduza that Kozak was “not very comfortable” dealing with the heads of the departments formally subordinate to him, which were mainly staffed by people from the security forces. “But he wasn’t used to shirking his duties. He kept working,” this person added.
In the fall of 2024, a political crisis erupted in Abkhazia — part of Kozak’s portfolio — over a proposed investment deal that would have allowed Russian businesses to buy up local real estate. Faced with major protests, the region’s leader, Aslan Bzhania, agreed to step down and hold snap elections. Sergey Kiriyenko then oversaw the election of a pro-Russian candidate.
“Obviously, [Kozak’s] work didn’t go well here: they seemed to have almost pushed through an agreement, but it all ended in protests. Plus, he doesn’t have any real specialists who could work on a crisis election. Once again, [Kiriyenko] decided to showcase himself as an effective crisis manager. After [the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in] Syria, a victory for the wrong candidate in Abkhazia would have been a complete failure [for the Kremlin]. It was important to save face,” a source close to the political bloc told Meduza at the time.
Kiriyenko visited Abkhazia and made promises, including the reopening of Sukhumi Airport, a train connection to the Russian city of Sochi, and the construction of a children’s hospital. A team of political strategists was brought in to support the Kremlin’s preferred candidate, former vice president Badra Gunba. Meanwhile, Gunba’s opponent, former economy minister Adgur Ardzinba, was also pro-Russian.
After a second round of voting, Gunba won the race. Although the opposition claimed there had been vote rigging, they didn’t directly challenge the results. Satisfied with Kiriyenko’s work, Putin extended his domestic policy czar’s portfolio to include South Ossetia, and then Armenia and Transnistria, all of which had previously been under Kozak’s purview.
“Both Ardzinba and Gunba would have worked with Russia. But Kiriyenko installed exactly the person the Kremlin wanted. This approach is more in demand now,” said the political strategist, who worked in Abkhazia in the 2010s and is familiar with the mood in the breakaway region.
According to this source, after the Abkhazia and South Ossetia portfolios were handed over to Kiriyenko, Kozak lost his remaining financial leverage and was reduced to a “figurehead.” Kiriyenko then proposed to Putin that all of the administration’s engagement across the post-Soviet space be placed under his control. By all appearances, the president agreed. In late August, he abolished the Kremlin’s departments for interregional and cultural relations with foreign countries and for cross-border cooperation — both formerly subordinate to Kozak — and tasked Chief of Staff Anton Vaino with establishing a single department for strategic partnerships, reporting to Kiriyenko.
According to Vedomosti, Kozak was under consideration for the post of Putin’s envoy to Russia’s Northwestern Federal District, but he declined the position, citing “age, fatigue, and his health. “In many ways, the decision was emotional. No one has ever stripped away a Putin ally’s powers so aggressively before his very eyes. But [Kozak] also disagrees with the overall policy direction. Kozak likely understands that in this kind of power structure, where everyone tells Putin what he wants [to hear], there’s no place for him,” said Meduza’s source close to the Kremlin.
However, this person believes that the president “won’t completely abandon” his longtime ally and will give him “an honorary sinecure in a business that’s state-owned or loyal to the state,” such as a seat on a major company’s board of directors. “Kozak didn’t break any rules, and trusted figures are allowed to decline offers,” he explained. “Turning down the role of plenipotentiary envoy certainly doesn’t mean rejecting an important mission.”
Story by Andrey Pertsev
Translation by Eilish Hart