Gen. Sergei Surovikin, who knew beforehand concerning the aborted mutiny in opposition to Russia’s army management, in line with New York Times reporting, was the commander of all Russian forces in Ukraine from October 2022 to this January, when he was reassigned.
The 56-year-old officer, nicknamed “General Armageddon” by the Russian media due to his popularity for ruthlessness, has not been seen publicly since early Saturday. Several pro-war Russian blogs reported that the authorities had been investigating army service members with ties to Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who led the rebellion, however these experiences couldn’t be independently confirmed.
Mr. Prigozhin and General Surovikin have identified one another at the least since Russia’s intervention in Syria’s warfare, the place army analysts say the overall performed a outstanding function in turning the preventing in favor of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad.
Fighters from Mr. Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenary group had been on the bottom in Syria on the time, and experiences point out that each Wagner and General Surovikin used the civil warfare for monetary achieve. A Wagner-linked firm secured a 25 p.c share of earnings from Syrian oil and gasoline manufacturing at fields the mercenaries captured from Islamic State militants, a Russian news website reported. General Surovikin’s spouse owns a phosphate mining business in Syria, in line with an investigation by the group of jailed opposition activist Aleksei Navalny.
Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and Mr. Prigozhin sought a bigger function for General Surovikin after it turned clear that Russian forces wouldn’t be capable of obtain their army targets as rapidly as army leaders had deliberate.
When he was appointed commander of forces in Ukraine, Mr. Prigozhin referred to as Surovikin “the most competent commander in the Russian Army,” in line with a press release quoted by Russia’s Live 24 news company on the time.
Although General Surovikin was reassigned in January to command Russia’s air and area forces, he was extensively revered for overseeing a comparatively orderly Russian retreat from the southern Ukrainian metropolis of Kherson final fall.
He was changed in Ukraine by Gen. Valery Gerasimov, who turned an everyday topic of Mr. Prigozhin’s more and more vituperative rants on Telegram. The transfer was extensively seen as a demotion for General Surovikin, and the Russian Defense Ministry stated the shake-up would assist enhance “the effectiveness of troop management.”
Samuel Ramani, an affiliate fellow on the Royal United Services Institute, a British-based analysis group, stated that the overall retains assist amongst Russian troops in Ukraine, which might have made him a useful ally to Mr. Prigozhin. He beforehand oversaw the Russian army’s southern command, which is headquartered in Rostov-on-Don, the town Wagner briefly seized through the mutiny.
“I’m sure that there were some people in the southern military district who would have likely been loyal to him, and if he gave directions to to back Prigozhin or work with Prigozhin, they probably would have helped his forces come in,” stated Mr. Ramani, the creator of a latest e book concerning the warfare in Ukraine.
Besides main Russian forces in Syria, General Surovikin was in Chechnya within the early 2000s, in line with state news media and his biography on the Russian Defense Ministry’s web site. Human Rights Watch stated in 2020 that he was amongst army leaders who may bear “command responsibility” for human rights violations in Syria.
He participated in a failed 1991 coup in opposition to Mikhail Gorbachev and spent at the least six months in jail after troopers underneath his command killed three protesters, however was ultimately launched with out trial, in line with the Jamestown Foundation, a conservative analysis group in Washington. In 1995, the group stated, he was convicted of arms buying and selling and obtained a suspended sentence, however the conviction was later overturned.
He was positioned on a European Union sanctions record on Feb. 23, 2022, a day earlier than Russia invaded Ukraine.
Source: www.nytimes.com