When Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko walked up to the state-run TASS news agency’s Soviet brutalist headquarters a few blocks from the Kremlin on July 5, no one suspected that he would announce the appointment of a new general director. TASS’s general director Sergei Mikhailov, 54, who was honored with the presidential Order of Friendship in 2021, had resigned of his own volition, Chernyshenko announced, pointing to Mikhailov, who sat next to him with an anxious expression. Andrei Kondrashov, the deputy general director of state-run VGTRK and former spokesman for Putin's 2018 election headquarters, was named as Mikhailov’s replacement. The reshuffling at TASS, which came just days after the Wagner mercenary group’s aborted mutiny, was not widely covered by the media. But for Mikhailov himself and TASS’s almost 2,000 employees it came as a shock, three people familiar with the former general director told The Moscow Times. Mikhailov was in fact sacked as the Kremlin's punishment for TASS’s coverage of the Wagner mercenary group’s mutiny, which it believed cast Russian authorities in an unfavorable light. His dismissal was confirmed to The Moscow Times by a high-ranking TASS manager, a presidential administration official, two senior sources in the State Duma, and a Russian government official. All of them were granted anonymity due to the risk of repercussions for disclosing confidential information to the media.