Dmitri Kozlov
Senior Technician | PleistoVentures International - Siberian Research Station

Language / Origin: Russian (native), English (functional) / Russia

Tenure: 22 months

Security Profile Notes: Moderate Neuroticism. Knows where every body is buried. Fluent Russian, functional English. Raised the safety concern Chadwick Webb couldn’t parse in February 2025. Deeply frustrated.

Kat Byrne's Notes / For SA&T Specialist Use Only 

Kozlov has been here longer than anyone on the non-management technical staff. Twenty-two months. He was here for all three 2025 incidents. He raised the safety concern in February 2025 that Chadwick Webb could not understand, and the mammoth noticed the gap before the humans resolved it. I have read that incident report several times. What it describes is a man who did everything correctly and was failed by the communication infrastructure around him. That is not a small thing to live with for over twelve months with no resolution and two more incidents behind it.

He knows where everything is buried at this facility. I mean that in the practical sense - he knows the systems, the workarounds, the history of every infrastructure decision made under three different ownership regimes, what was documented and what was not, what works and why and what is one bad winter away from not working. That knowledge is not written down anywhere I have found. It lives in his head and in his hands, and his English is functional rather than fluent, which means the full extent of what he knows has never been fully accessible to management in the language management operates in. I do not think this is deliberate. I think it is a structural failure that has compounded over twenty-two months into something that looks like opacity but is actually just an organization that never invested in the bridge.

His frustration is real and it is documented and it is, from where I sit, entirely earned. A man who raises a safety concern correctly and watches it get lost in translation, then watches two more incidents happen, and is still showing up and still doing his job and still keeping his frustration contained rather than expressed - that is not a security risk in the conventional sense. That is a person running on professional discipline that has been tested more than it should have been. Moderate Neuroticism means he feels this. He does not perform it. There is a difference and it matters for how you approach him.

I have been working on earning his trust since October and I am not there yet. He is professionally correct with me. He answers what I ask. He does not volunteer. This is, I have come to believe, not evasion - it is the reasonable caution of someone who has learned that institutional goodwill at this facility has a short half-life across ownership changes, and that the people who arrived in October 2025 may or may not still be here in October 2026. I am trying to demonstrate otherwise through consistency rather than through conversation, because I think that is the currency he actually trades in. We will see.

The security consideration is specific: his functional English means that in a high-stress situation, communication with non-Russian-speaking staff degrades exactly when it needs to be most precise. February 2025 demonstrated this at cost. I have flagged it. The mitigation I want is a protocol that does not depend on real-time translation under pressure, and I have not yet gotten management to prioritize it. This is also in this file so you know where it stands.

He submitted to the newsletter music feature. Nine Depeche Mode tracks and one Rammstein. I grew up with some of this music. I know what Policy of Truth is about and I know what Wrong is about and I know what Never Let Me Down Again is about, and I am not going to write what I think about a man who has been at this facility for twenty-two months choosing those particular tracks. You can work that out yourself. The Rammstein is called Stripped and it is the one moment in the playlist where the containment drops slightly. I noted it.

He is the person at this facility I most want to get right. I have not gotten there yet. I am keeping this file open.

Dmitri Kozlov's Playlist - Staff newsletter feature, self-submitted.