According to American journalist
James Kirchick, the Carnegie Moscow Center was one of the leading "Western" think tanks in the field of Russian research, but the situation changed after the
2012 Russian presidential election, when
Vladimir Putin became the
president of Russia again. In January 2013, Putin's critic and the then chair of the think tank's Society and Regions Program, , left the center after the cancellation of his program. Petrov said that the decision to cancel the program was initiated by the head of the center,
Dmitri Trenin, who did not want to annoy Putin. In 2014, the then editor-in-chief of the center's magazine,
Maria Lipman, and Russian political scientist
Lilia Shevtsova also left the center. Both Lipman and Shevtsova were also critics of Putin. The Center's director Dmitri Trenin was described by Russian political writer
Andrey Piontkovsky as an “elite Kremlin propagandist targeting the Western expert audience” suggesting that the Carnegie Foundation was complicit in Kremlin propaganda for the 30 years Trenin was director of Carnegie's Moscow Center. == Scholars ==