A number of politicians from the entourage of Russian President Vladimir Putin were caught off guard by the decision to start a war in Ukraine.

This is stated in an extensive publication of The New York Times.

In particular, the press secretary of the Russian president Dmytro Peskov assures that he learned about the invasion only after it began.

The head of the presidential administration Anton Vaino and his first deputy Oleksiy Gromov also speak about their ignorance of Putin's plans to start a war.

In a comment to the newspaper, the deputy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation Kostyantyn Zatulin, who is a member of the Scientific Council of the Security Council of the Russian Federation and who is called a "leading expert on Ukraine", said that he was not consulted about a full-scale invasion.

"Everything related to this decision came as a surprise not only to me, but also to many people in power," Zatulin claims.

Former Kremlin adviser Serhii Markov recalled that at the end of 2021, when Russia was building up military forces on the border with Ukraine, "one of the deputy ministers" tried to find out about further plans, but in vain.

According to him, even some members of the Security Council of Russia were not informed of the true intentions of the master of the Kremlin until the last moment.

"Many representatives of the elite found out about the preparations for the invasion too late," - summarizes the authoritative American publication.

It will be recalled that at the beginning of December, the head of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, said that the settlement process with Ukraine will be "difficult and will take some time."

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