Spanish
The Kremlin confirmed this Thursday the resignation "by own will" of the number two of the presidential administration, Dmitri Kozak, the first high-ranking Russian official to resign due to opposition to the war in Ukraine.
"I can confirm that, indeed, Dmitri Kozak has submitted his resignation," said the spokesman for the Russian Presidency, Dmitri Peskov, in his daily press briefing.
When asked about the reasons for that decision, Peskov pointed out that Kozak did so "of his own accord" without giving further details.
At the same time, he did not specify whether Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed the respective decree.
"We haven't published the decree, there is no decree," Peskov said.
This is the first case of resignation of a figure close to the Russian president due to his criticism of the war, an attitude that has been persecuted in all sectors of society since February 2022.
The Vedomosti newspaper reported on Wednesday that Kozak, 66, will take over as plenipotentiary representative in the president's Northwestern federal district, although other media outlets suggest he could hold a position in the business world.
According to The New York Times, as reported in mid-August, Kózák tried to convince Putin to stop the military campaign in Ukraine.
Kózak, for many years one of the president's closest collaborators, would even have presented a plan for the cessation of military actions and also proposed reforming the judicial system and strengthening control over the security forces.
It appears that the deputy head of the Presidential Administration had warned Putin in 2022 about the consequences of the war, and once the fighting began, he again proposed a truce, which was rejected by the head of state.
Kózak would have also asked his Western interlocutors for arguments with which to convince the Kremlin chief to stop the fighting, according to the American newspaper, which unleashed all kinds of criticism among Russian propagandists.
Born in Ukraine, Kózak studied law in Leningrad, from where he would join Putin's team in Moscow in 1999.
Since then, he served, among other things, as Putin's campaign manager in the 2004 presidential elections and as Deputy Prime Minister between 2008 and 2020, after which he went on to work in the Kremlin.
