Media: Only One Person Told Putin That An Attack On Ukraine Would Be A Disaster
- 20.02.2026, 21:49
He was horrified by the Kremlin chief's plans.
The Kremlin was confident before the war with Ukraine began in February 2022 that the vast majority of Ukrainians would support the Russian invasion.
According to The Guardian, citing European intelligence, Moscow estimated that only 10% of Ukrainians would be willing to resist the occupation troops. The rest (90%), the Kremlin believed, would either actively support the entry of the Russian army or eventually accept it with a little grumbling.
The person who had different information about Ukraine from what everyone else was saying was Sergey Naryshkin, the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service. He became famous for his stuttering and confused speech at a historic meeting in the Kremlin where Vladimir Putin asked Security Council members for their views on Ukraine.
Naryshkin, according to The Guardian's sources, knew something that others did not. "But he is weak and indecisive, and Putin wanted everyone to be part of the solution. That's why you saw the behavior (Naryshkin's - ed.) that you saw," the publication's interlocutor said. Naryshkin looked frightened but ultimately supported Putin.
Only one person spoke openly against the Kremlin meeting - deputy chief of presidential administration Dmitri Kozak, one of Putin's longesttime associates who has known him since the mid-1990s. Kozak was horrified by Putin's plans, but only realized what was happening on the day of the meeting in the Kremlin, a source close to him told The Guardian.
According to the publication, during that meeting Kozak argued to Putin not from a moral but from a strategic point of view that an invasion of Ukraine would be disastrous, although he did not know whether Putin was planning a limited operation to seize Donbass or a full-scale war. After the meeting ended, Kozak was left alone with Putin and continued to argue with him, a source told The Guardian. Kozak's speech was cut from the TV broadcast. He resigned from all posts in the AP at the end of 2025.