Most of Putin's presidential administration is secretly against the Ukraine war but don't dare tell him: report

• Much of Putin's presidential administration is opposed to the Ukraine war, the FT reported.
• But there's been only a handful of people willing to confront him or step down since the war began.

Many people serving in President Vladimir Putin's executive office are privately opposed to his war in Ukraine, but can't openly say so, according to a new report.

Members of Russia's presidential administration and economic cabinet have told friends they are against the war, according to the Financial Times, whose report drew on the insight of multiple unnamed Putin confidants and former officials.

The presidential administration consists of top-level officials who act as the leader's executive office.

Over the course of the war there has been a steady trickle of reports indicating unease among high-ranking Kremlin insiders, but this is among the most powerful yet.

"It's really a unique war in world history, when all the elite is against it," one former senior official said, according to the FT.

Some officials have left. One high-ranking advisor, Anatoly Chubais, resigned his position last March, while another unnamed former senior official has left for private business and applied for an Israeli passport as part of a plan to exit the country, the FT reported.

Another unnamed advisor confronted Putin directly about the failings of the war in October, as The Washington Post reported, citing US intelligence.

People close to the president told the FT that Putin's fatal flaw is his weakness for loyalty — valuing this over competence.

"They need to be honest with him and they are not," a figure close to Putin told the paper. "The management system is a huge problem. It creates big gaps in his knowledge and the quality of the information he gets is poor."

Those who Putin trusts to help guide his decisions is a vanishingly small group. Even his own foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, was wrong-footed by the announcement of the war, only learning about it hours before, the FT reported.

And as the war faltered, Putin has attempted to break out of his famed isolation by consulting, per the FT, with hyper-nationalist bloggers, who are known for their unvarnished assessment of the country's military progress.

But these rumblings have done little to deter Putin from his warpath, even as the predicted rout in Ukraine has turned into a year-long struggle with no end in sight.