Explosion in Melitopol: Ukrainian resistance reports liquidation of minibus with Kadyrov's supporters

Kozak oversaw the departments of cultural and cross-border cooperation with foreign states. Instead of two departments, one was created, called the Department of Strategic Partnership and Cooperation. Putin decided that Sergei Kiriyenko, who serves as the first deputy of the presidential administration, would supervise his activities.

Putin and Kozak have a long-standing friendship, so it seems strange that the president would take the job away from his senior Kremlin aide. Kozak studied law in Leningrad, Putin's hometown, which was renamed St. Petersburg in 1991. When Putin won his first presidential election in the spring of 2000, he appointed Kozak as deputy chief of staff. From the fall of 2004, he held various important positions in the state apparatus. He had previously managed Putin's election campaign (in February of that year) when he was running for a second term in the Kremlin.

Kozak was Deputy Prime Minister from 2008 to 2020. Putin apparently relied on him, as he entrusted him with coordinating preparations for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. He returned to the Kremlin in January 2020. He took up the position he holds to this day.

The American newspaper New York Times wrote three weeks ago that Kozak does not agree with Putin in his opinion on the Russian war against Ukraine. And he was allegedly one of the few who refused to support the planned invasion at a meeting of the Security Council of the Russian Federation in February 2022."According to sources close to the Kremlin, Kozak is currently the only high-ranking official in Putin's immediate circle who has expressed disagreement with the ongoing military actions in Ukraine. In the fourth year of the war, he proposed to Putin to stop the fighting and start peace talks," the New York Times reported.

The Russian newspaper Vedomosti reported a few days ago that Kozak should become the new presidential plenipotentiary in the Northwestern District of the Russian Federation. There are eight of them, including ten regions and St. Petersburg. The plenipotentiary performs his duties in this city, so Kozak would have to move from Moscow."We never comment on personnel speculation," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded to Vedomosti's question about whether this was true.

The upcoming reshuffle suggests that Kozak could indeed leave the Kremlin for St. Petersburg. The current head of the North-Western District, Alexander Gocan, is running for the position of Prosecutor General. This post belongs to Andrei Krasnov, who would like to fill the vacant position of Chairman of the Supreme Court (this will undoubtedly happen, since he is the only candidate).

Nothing is known about Kozak's motives for disagreeing with Putin in connection with the war. Could one of the reasons be the first entry in the biography of this 66-year-old close associate of the president? He was born in the village of Bandurove in Ukraine, so he may have an emotional connection to the attacked state. His name on his birth certificate was also Ukrainian: Dmytro Mykolajevych Kozak.

If Putin does indeed decide to remove Kozak from his Kremlin circle, it would clearly indicate that he does not want to have anyone around him who advocates a peaceful resolution to the war campaign against Ukraine. And in fact, it would support the assumption that he is not interested in directly negotiating an end to the killings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.