Russia has relieved Gen Sergei Surovikin of his command of the Russian aerospace forces, in the highest-level sacking yet of a military commander after Yevgeny Prigozhin’s abortive mutiny in June.
The extended absence and now removal of Surovikin, a prominent commander, indicates the shock waves sent through the military establishment in the wake of Prigozhin’s armed uprising. He sent thousands of troops to seize a military headquarters in the city of Rostov-on-Don and try to march on Moscow to protest against the dismantling of his Wagner private military company.
Prigozhin’s public support for Surovikin, who was seen as an ally of the Wagner militia in the Russian defence ministry, had raised questions of whether he or other senior commanders had aided the mutiny or at least had prior knowledge of Prigozhin’s plans.
Prigozhin has reappeared in public this week, publishing a video apparently from somewhere in Africa in which he said his mercenaries were working to make “Russia even greater on every continent and Africa even more free.” He had reportedly agreed to move his troops out of Ukraine after the mutiny, redeploying his mercenaries first to Belarus, and now Africa.
But Surovikin has not resurfaced, and was rumoured to have been put under house arrest, interrogated, or even put in the notorious Lefortovo prison. His whereabouts have not been confirmed publicly.
On Tuesday, Alexei Venediktov, the well-connected former head of the Echo of Moscow radio station, wrote that Surovikin had been removed from his command as the head of the Russian aerospace forces, citing a government order.
He would remain an employee of the ministry of defence, Venediktov added, suggesting that Surovikin could merely be demoted, not jailed.
Venediktov told the Guardian that the information was provided by a member of Surovikin’s family via a mutual friend. He said the order had not been made public and would probably not be published by the Russian government.
A second source briefed on the situation by those close to Surovikin said that he would step down from his position as the head of Russia’s aerospace forces, removing him from formal command of Russia’s air force and air defence troops. Informally, he had already been sidelined from that role since being detained after the mutiny.
The source said that Surovikin had been thoroughly questioned and “shaken down,” but said that prosecutors had not established that he had committed treason.
Putin had not made a final decision on Surovikin’s fate, the source said, and it was possible he would consider Surovikin’s popularity among the military rank-and-file as a mitigating factor.
RIA Novosti, a state news agency, cited an “informed source” on Wednesday as saying that Surovikin had been relieved of his command of the Russian aerospace forces and replaced by Col Gen Viktor Afzalov.
Surovikin was last seen in public on the day of the mutiny, appearing in a video where he appealed to the mutinying mercenaries to “stop”. It was unclear if he had already been detained at the time.
Surovikin’s disappearance led to rumours of a broader purge within the military, and more recently, an influence campaign by military bloggers, former commanders and Russian officials to rehabilitate his reputation.
They pointed to the “Surovikin line”, the military defences established by Surovikin in Ukraine after he took control of the Russian invasion force from last October until January, which have been cited as helping to blunt the Ukrainian summer counteroffensive.
“Surovikin is a very complex individual with four decades of service to the army and he has a lot of lore around him,” said Dara Massicot, a senior policy researcher at RAND who specialises in Russian military strategy. “Everyone in Russia who is paying close attention to this, like your military bloggers, are asking: ‘Where is Surovikin?’ The reason our defence is holding is because of him, where is he?”
Since then his fate has remained in limbo. Venediktov claimed that Surovikin had last been allowed to speak with his family on 26 June, days after the mutiny. “He was calming down his family: everything will be normal, everything will be normal,” he said. Otherwise, there had been “no connection” and he had failed to call his wife and daughter on their birthdays, a family tradition, Venediktov said.
Members of the Surovikin family and their friends approached by the Guardian on social media did not reply to requests for comment.
Venediktov said that Surovikin had been questioned by a special commission that was set up by Sergei Shoigu to investigate Russian officers after the Prigozhin mutiny. Details of that commission, as well as what authorities it holds, have not been made public.
Venediktov said that Shoigu and his deputy, the chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov, might be engaged in score-settling for criticism that they had received from top commanders like Surovikin.
“We know that there have been disagreements between various generals and the top brass and they existed long before the mutiny,” he said. “I think that now the time of the mutiny is when all scores can be settled.”
While a number of Russian commanders were rumoured to have been purged in the days after the mutiny, most have reappeared in public and appear to have retained command of their posts.
Several top commanders, including Col Gen Andrey Yudin, and the deputy head of military intelligence, Lt Gen Vladimir Alexeyev, who was seen on video speaking with Prigozhin during the mutiny, are among the handful still unaccounted for.
“The suspicion that has potentially fallen on senior serving officers highlights how Prigozhin’s abortive insurrection has worsened existing fault lines within Russia’s national security community,” the UK Defence Ministry wrote in an intelligence assessment after Surovikin’s disappearance.
Conflicts within the Russian military remain. Several weeks after the mutiny, Gen Ivan Popov was relieved of his command of the 58th CAA after he complained of the “massive death and injury of our brothers from enemy artillery” in a voice note published online. Popov, whose fighters were engaged in heavy fighting in the Zaporozhiye region, had also demanded troop rotations and better counter-battery systems.
The mutiny and other public complaints by military commanders were “symptoms of a much larger problem,” said Massicot.
“The problem is at the top,” said Massicot. “The top of the military leadership is not listening to the truth about what is going on. And they’re getting all this stray voltage from subordinates because they’re stuck in place and they can’t do anything about it.”
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