When I saw this NY Times headline late Sunday evening — i.e., The Putin Confidant Who Pushed Back Against the War — it caught my attention because this is something I have neither seen nor heard in my seven trips to Russia since December 2023. Then I read the story and the male-bovine-excrement alarm started sounding (or should I say, stinking).

NY Times Weirdly Publishing a Bizarre Propaganda Piece About Putin

by Larry C. Johnson

Here are the salient portions of this odoriferous article:

On the second day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one of President Vladimir V. Putin’s closest aides refused to follow his orders.

Mr. Putin had told the aide, Dmitri N. Kozak, to demand Ukraine’s surrender, according to three people close to Mr. Kozak. Mr. Kozak declined, insisting that he did not know what the Russian leader was trying to accomplish with his invasion. As the call grew heated, Mr. Kozak told Mr. Putin that he was ready to be arrested or shot for his refusal.

Only later did Mr. Kozak learn that Mr. Putin had put that call in 2022 on speakerphone, the people said, turning the senior officials in the president’s office into witnesses to a rare moment of insubordination.

Mr. Kozak was a lone voice of dissent in Mr. Putin’s inner circle, a small crack in his iron grip on power. With so few people willing to challenge him, Mr. Putin has exerted near-total control over Russia’s prosecution of the war.

Oh my God… Insurrection!!! I read on with trepidation, expecting to read how Mr. Kozak was arrested and imprisoned… or worse yet, tossed from one of the onion-shaped towers of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square (aka Cathedral of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat). How could it be otherwise? Vladimir Putin is a vicious tyrant who tolerates no dissent, or so we are told regularly in the West.

Nope. Guess what happened to Mr. Kozak, who reportedly refused to carry out a Putin order?

Mr. Kozak, 67, resigned as a deputy chief of staff to Mr. Putin this September, a month after The New York Times reported on his private criticism of the war. In interviews since then, six Russians close to Mr. Kozak described the transformation of a 30-year Putin confidant into a locus of antiwar sentiment in the Russian elite.

Let me get this straight… 44 months after Kozak allegedly refuses a direct order from Putin, one that is witnessed by several senior Russian officials, Kozak is not fired immediately, he is not arrested, he is not sent to Siberia, and he is not subjected to torture. He keeps his job as deputy chief of staff and quietly retires in September 2025 at the age of 67, which is not an uncommon age for retirement in Russia. What is wrong with this picture?

I don’t know if the NY Times former Moscow bureau chief, Anton Troianovski, intended to obliterate the meme that Putin is a psychopathic killer who tolerates no dissent, but that is exactly what she did. Since he is identified as former, was this article just a desperate attempt to pander to the West in hopes of securing a new sinecure? Perhaps, but that does not explain why the editors sitting in NY City thought it a dandy idea to publish a story that is so contradictory.

I think the following paragraph from the piece reveals the reason it was published:

In making his disagreements with the president known within the ruling elite, Mr. Kozak is giving voice to quiet dissatisfaction felt by many in Moscow’s business and cultural class, and even by other government officials, the six confidants say. This year, that dismay has been exacerbated by Mr. Putin’s refusal to end the war even on the favorable terms being offered by President Trump.

This is dishonest reporting of the worst kind. It is intended to persuade the Western audience that still thinks the NY Times is worth a subscription to believe that Russian support for the war in Ukraine is fading and we need only to keep the war going because, one of these days, Putin will fail and Russia will surrender to the West. During October and November of this year I interviewed more than 40 prominent Russians, which included representatives of different political parties, prominent academics and journalists, military officers and soldiers, and senior members of the Duma… I never heard anything of the dissent claimed by Mr. Troianovski and attributed to Mr. Kozak. To the contrary, several expressed frustration that Putin was not hitting Ukraine hard enough. 

What do you think?

https://sonar21.com/ny-times-weirdly-publishing-a-bizarre-propaganda-piece-about-putin/

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