The Kremlin Without Kozak: The Era of the Lawyers Is Over

Western media outlets have extensively covered the resignation of Dmitry Kozak, deputy chief of staff to the Russian president, seeing it as a sign of a hardening of the regime: the last person who opposed the war in Ukraine has been forced to jump ship. Some have even referred to it as a “disgrace.” Borukh Taskin and Aaron Lea offer a different analysis, tracing the edifying career of Kozak, the architect of Russian policy in the “hot spots” of the former empire: Abkhazia, Transnistria, Crimea, and Donbas. What if this resignation was just a cover-up?

Dmitry Kozak, a lawyer of Ukrainian origin and trusted advisor to Vladimir Putin, is a true grand master among the Kremlin’s “chess players”: a virtuoso in the art of identifying, creating, and exploiting legal loopholes, the author of studies offering a facade of legitimacy to cover up geopolitical aggression. It is precisely a man of this kind who has fallen victim to a new “chess game.”

Dmitry Kozak’s crucial role in the annexation of Crimea in 2014 earned him a reputation as a “silent wizard” who orchestrated the triumph of the hybrid war that changed Russia’s borders. His resignation on September 18, 2025, may mark the collapse of this legal system, which is certainly flawed but still in force, and more generally the change in the doctrine of legality on which Putin has relied during his 26 years of rule.

The resignation of Kozak, the architect of Russia’s territorial annexations and the Kremlin-approved image of a pariah but pragmatic state, is a landmark event, comparable only to the withdrawal of Vladislav Surkov from the Putin administration (another architect of territorial annexations) 14 years ago. After Surkov’s departure, the regime embarked on a spiral of unrestrained violence against its citizens—Surkov’s glamorous internal politics were, after all, more elegant. Today, Kozak’s departure signals the regime’s definitive transformation into a totalitarian state that needs no justification for resorting to violence, both internally and externally. Without Kozak, there is no longer even any need to formally discuss the issue of international legal standards—all that remains is “revolutionary rationality” and directives from the Lubyanka.

Kozak was born in 1958 in the village of Bandurovo, in the Kirovograd region of Soviet Ukraine. After school, he served in the GRU special forces then studied at the Vinnytsia Polytechnic University. Kozak then studied at the law faculty of Leningrad State University, graduating before Dmitry Medvedev but after Vladimir Putin. He then worked as a prosecutor and later as a corporate lawyer for a large real estate company, before joining the executive authorities of the city of Leningrad, where he received the best training to join Putin’s elite.

Let’s try to understand the activities of this Kremlin patrician.

Moldova and Georgia: testing grounds for conflict schemes

In the early 2000s, Kozak developed the concept of asymmetric federalism for Transnistria, a legal conflict created to ensure long-term Russian influence in Moldova under the guise of federalism. In November 2003, he proposed to Chișinău that an upper house of parliament be created with veto rights for smaller entities: 13 senators from mainland Moldova, nine from the separatists in Transnistria, and four from the national entity of Gagauzia. The project provided for the formal extension of the stay of Russian troops, numbering 2,000 soldiers without heavy weapons, until 2020. However, it contradicted Article 11 of the Moldovan Constitution on permanent neutrality: the Kozak memorandum effectively legalized the presence of foreign (Russian) troops, even though Chișinău had promised to get rid of them. The document effectively nullified the commitments made by Russia at the 1999 OSCE summit in Istanbul (to withdraw weapons and contingents from Moldovan territory) and transformed the “transition period” into a norm with no time limit.

The “special status” provided for in the memorandum gave Transnistrian separatists and the national formation of Gagauzia a veto over foreign policy and defense, which meant a minority veto over any Moldovan initiative in favor of European integration. Finally, Kozak’s concept did not provide for external guarantors for Moldova and circumvented the constitutional amendment procedure (by referendum or decision of the Constitutional Court): a political agreement was to replace the legal procedure.

This was a “red rag” for the EU and the U.S.. On the surface, this concept appeared to be a compromise, but in reality it legally cemented the right of the periphery, which was de facto under Russian control, to block Chișinău’s decisions, and placed the Russian army as guarantor of the new system. Transnistria, which on the map resembles a wedge along the Ukrainian border, with the Russian army and a puppet government, transformed Kozak’s concept of a peace plan into a long-term instrument of control over the entire regional contour. Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin, a communist, ultimately refused to sign the document at the last minute, and Putin’s visit to Chișinău was canceled.

This was the first time that a “geopolitical coup” prepared by the Kremlin, namely an attempt to legalize military presence abroad under the pretext of a “settlement,” had been publicly torpedoed. This failure was a very traumatic experience for Moscow: in Kremlin accounts, it was equated with the “color revolutions,” and the “special status” model established in the Moldovan case was then entirely transposed to the Ukrainian case. In July 2018, Kozak was again given an official mandate for Moldova, as the president’s special representative for trade and economic relations with Moldova. He returned to the region under a “technocratic” guise and continued to oversee the Moldovan dossier until 2021, when he prepared the meeting, which ultimately did not take place, between Putin and Moldovan President Maia Sandu.

Thanks to his experience in Moldova, Kozak learned how to successfully stir up and exploit post-Soviet border conflicts, inspired by Anatoly Lukyanov (with the full approval of Mikhail Gorbachev), as Transnistria and South Ossetia were Soviet borderlands. These strategies were perfected during the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia: Kozak was responsible for Abkhazia and South Ossetia and supported “frozen conflicts” in order to block the integration of these “republics” into Georgia and keep them under Russian influence.

Belarus: the energy stranglehold

After the Moldovan and Georgian cases, in the early 2010s Kozak became the main architect of another “silent” expansion of Russia: the economic rapprochement of Belarus and Russia through oil, gas, fertilizers, and the legal mechanisms of the Union State. While in Moldova he proposed asymmetrical federalization, in Belarus Kozak oversaw the “roadmaps” for integration and fiscal and tariff compliance in order to institutionalize Minsk’s dependence on Moscow. The Union State programs and the system of inter-state transfers have in fact created a supranational regulatory framework—a “common market” and a unification of rules: Kozak attempted to translate political integration into legal and tariff terms, mainly in the field of energy, as he was also Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian government in charge of energy and natural resources. He attempted to ensure the absorption of Belarus into the Russian legal sphere: between 2019 and 2021, 28 Union State “roadmaps” were signed, and Kozak continuously conducted closed-door negotiations on the terms of oil and gas delivery, setting exclusive prices and distributing subsidies.

This is where Kozak’s characteristic style clearly manifested itself: not public rhetoric, but legal construction that transforms any relationship into an instrument of control. The Belarusian experience provided him with material for future models: where it is impossible to impose federalization, economic strangulation can be put in place: prices, subsidies, and common standards become an integrated veto right.

Ukraine: collision of international norms

Kozak became the key architect of the “legal cover” for the annexation of Crimea and the large-scale Russian invasion.

In the case of Crimea, Kozak drew on the entire range of conflict of laws: from challenging the transfer of Crimea from the RSFS to the USSR in 1954 to using the 1997 agreements and the 2010 Kharkiv agreements on the Black Sea Fleet as a rhetorical basis for the “legality” of the Russian Federation’s presence.

For some regions of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, annexed in 2014, the Russian language and the “right to self-determination” have become instruments of “integration.” Kozak was also responsible for the “integration” of Chechnya, where the right to self-determination was denied through murder and destruction.

Thus, Kozak has this time used language and the right to self-determination as a decisive argument for the separatists’ “right to defense,” even though Resolution 68/262 of the United Nations General Assembly, as well as numerous agreements and memoranda between Russia, Ukraine, and many Western countries, have repeatedly confirmed the territorial integrity of Ukraine.

In EU and U.S. decisions on sanctions, Kozak is designated as responsible for the “integration of the Republic of Crimea,” including infrastructure projects such as the construction of the $3.7 billion Crimean Bridge and the Crimean Special Economic Zones.

In January 2020, Kozak became deputy head of the presidential administration and senior representative for Ukraine, succeeding Surkov in this position, and took control of negotiations in the Minsk and “Normandy” formats.

In the first weeks of the full-scale invasion, he presented Putin with an option for an agreement on Ukraine’s neutral status—in effect, a reincarnation of the Moldovan model of “compromise,” but the Kremlin rejected this decision as “too moderate” and engaged in all-out war, convinced of the weakness of the “collective West” and its own power.

“Special status” and “legal guarantees” are Kozak’s favorite expressions, but with each new case, his scope of action narrowed and Moscow’s political will became more radical under the influence of the military bloc. Kozak justified and organized a “legal collision” in order to present the annexation as a reunification by mutual consent. President Viktor Yanukovych’s flight from Kyiv without a prior vote of impeachment by the Rada, the Ukrainian Parliament, created a constitutional vacuum, nullified the powers of the Rada, and made it possible to present (at least to the Russians) Ukraine as an ”insolvent state.” The letter from Yanukovych, who had taken refuge in Russia, requesting its intervention, combined with the 1997 agreement authorizing the presence of 25,000 troops in Crimea, justified the presence of the “little green men” who ensured the smooth occupation of the peninsula with minimal bloodshed. Kozak invoked Article 1 of the United Nations Charter on self-determination, referring to Kosovo’s independence in 2008, which Russia had opposed. Kozak’s idea was based on this duality: the aggression, presented as the restitution of Crimea, illegally ceded to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1954, was, in the Kremlin’s rhetoric, “redress for a historical injustice.”

The annexation took place almost without a shot being fired, but it still cost the lives of six Ukrainians. It became a model of hybrid warfare, combining legal, military, and economic strategies. But Putin failed to surpass Hitler during the Anschluss of Austria, where there were no casualties.

Kozak develops the legal facade of Ruscism

There is no doubt that the annexation of Crimea was carried out according to Hitler’s method. The Anschluss of Austria and the annexation of Crimea, although acts of brute force, were carefully concealed under a legal act. From a legal standpoint, Germany and Russia manipulated the conflict of laws rule relating to self-determination. They created a false “scope of application” (social relations requiring liberation) and a fabricated “connecting factor” (the will of the people), using referendums under obvious pressure to establish a reference link to their sovereignty. This was not a genuine implementation of international law, but rather a cynical exploitation of it in order to circumvent the prohibition on acquiring territory by force. Rhetorically, both used the same cohesive factors of ethnic kinship (“divided people” – Volksdeutsche, “one people” – “Russian world”) and historical resentment (shame of Versailles, Khrushchev’s “gift”) to justify themselves.

The invasion was (and still is) presented as the resolution of a legal “conflict”: the aggressor is not an aggressor at all, but an arbitrator with the appropriate jurisdiction. In Ukraine, Kozak mastered the art of polemical aikido, presenting history as an eternal “conflict” and borders as ethnic illusions. The Maidan was presented as a “fascist coup” and the referendum in Crimea as a democratic expression of the will of the people, which allowed Western diplomats to be drawn into endless and absurd debates. Kozak’s conception of Crimea, which initially seemed successful, had a long-term vulnerability inherent in conflictual constructs: UN General Assembly Resolution 68/262 declared the annexation illegal, and Ukraine’s resistance proved Russia’s strategic errors. In 2014, NATO condemned the annexation but refrained from taking action, while China and India bought time for Russia in the Security Council. Kozak’s collision relied on informational chaos, paralyzing factual discourse and creating the appearance of legal space for the irreversibility of Russia’s actions.

“Legal umbrella” for Russia’s expansionist economy

Behind the facade of the Kremlin’s geopolitical projects, Kozak acted as a “legal umbrella” for the oligarchs who provided the financial infrastructure necessary to carry out these projects. The most striking example is that of Vladimir Evtushenkov and AFK Sistema. When, in 2014, criminal proceedings were initiated against Evtushenkov in the Bashneft case and his assets seized, it was Kozak who actively acted as mediator and defender: without making any public statements, solely through official negotiations, he attempted to maintain a balance between law enforcement agencies and companies affiliated with quasi-state geopolitical projects. The logic behind this intervention is simple: Evtushenkov had been linked to Ukraine for many years, he had partly financed Yanukovych’s election campaigns, he had been at his side during all his informal meetings until the last days before the “Orange Revolution” of 2004, and his companies were important partners of Russian state structures in many post-Soviet countries. Thus, Kozak’s support for Evtushenkov, who had temporarily fallen out of favor, is inseparable from his support for the Kremlin’s instruments of soft expansion, from economic platforms to “friendly” oligarchs.

False opposition to the invasion of Ukraine

It is said that Kozak’s resignation had been planned since the moment he expressed his personal disagreement with Putin’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Disinformation campaigns were launched, echoed in unison by Russian-speaking and non-Russian-speaking media: Kozak allegedly warned Putin of fierce Ukrainian resistance and the introduction of Western sanctions crippling the Russian economy, and came into conflict with the Kremlin’s “hawks.” In 2023, Sergei Kirienko, a hardliner, usurped influence over the post-Soviet border regions (Abkhazia, where he is from, South Ossetia, Transnistria, Gagauzia) and withdrew budgets from Kozak, further marginalizing him.

In early 2025, Kozak reportedly called for peace negotiations and internal reforms, including limiting the activities of Russian security forces and strengthening the independence of the judiciary, measures that Putin probably considered almost heretical. And when Kozak was offered the position of presidential representative in the Northwestern Federal District, he refused, submitting his resignation—which Dmitry Peskov described as “voluntary.” However, opposition media continue to spread the Kremlin’s false information about the elimination of pragmatists, the strengthening of the positions of “hardliners,” and the weakening of hopes for de-escalation.

We believe that this is a cover-up and that Kozak is establishing himself as a “sleeper agent” in case negotiations on Ukraine are needed outside the Kremlin’s current requirements, and he will be in high demand personally.

The road has collapsed, the actors are falling into the swamp: a mechanic without a manifesto

Kozak’s resignation is an indicator of a change of model, as certain as the departure from public office of Alexei Kudrin, once Putin’s protector. Kozak’s Crimean legal facade, logical in its execution (if one can admire the talent of an executioner), was ultimately destroyed by Ukraine’s disobedience and the global condemnation of the Kremlin’s war.

Kozak undoubtedly had formal reasons for refusing to trade his comfortable position in Putin’s administration for a much less prestigious one: rumors have long been circulating about his cancer, which he went to Israel to treat with Putin’s permission.

Kozak will not be left without a sinecure; he has excellent connections in the financial and business world, notably with Herman Gref, AFK Sistema, and is a long-time friend of Kudrin – he will no doubt be found on the boards of major Russian companies.

The company he joins will reveal his willingness to distance himself from the war: if he joins the board of Rostekh or another military-related organization, rumors of his tacit dissent can be considered refuted; if he joins a civilian industry company, this will show what new task the Kremlin has actually entrusted him with. It is possible that he will simply become a “retiree,” but his involvement in the settlement of the Ukrainian conflict cannot be ruled out—otherwise, why would there have been rumors about his disagreements with Putin?

But all this will not change the fact that Kozak’s resignation symbolizes the Kremlin’s shift to another, much more primitive political and legal justification for the Russian Federation’s endless aggression. Kozak has been removed from the Kremlin’s chessboard, but he remains a general in Putin’s active reserve, even if, in Moscow, legal quibbles no longer interest many people: they can now have a field day with knives and Kalibr missiles.

Translated from Russian by Desk Russie

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