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A Russian general said he was dismissed as commander after telling the military leadership of the dire situation on the front in Ukraine, where he said Russian soldiers had been stabbed in the back by the failures of senior military officers.
After 24 June Wagner’s mercenaries rebelled, The biggest domestic challenge to the Russian state in decades, President Vladimir Putin has so far kept Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov at their jobs.
Major General Ivan Popov, commander of the 58th Combined Arms Army, said in an audio message released by Russian deputy Andrei Gorolyov that he was fired after telling the truth to senior officers about the situation at the front.
Popov said: “The Ukrainian army could not break through our ranks in the front, but our senior commander struck us from the rear, brutally beheading the army at the most difficult moment.”
Popov, whose military call banner was “Spartacus” and who commanded Russian units in southern Ukraine, openly raised the deaths of Russian soldiers from the Ukrainian artillery and said the army lacked proper counter artillery systems and enemy artillery reconnaissance.
There was no immediate comment from the Ministry of Defense and Reuters was unable to independently verify the authenticity of the audio message. Deputy Gorolyov is a hard-line former army commander who appears regularly on state television.
It was not clear when the message was recorded and Popov’s current whereabouts are not known. The Ministry of Defense did not say anything about his dismissal.
Such a public criticism of Russia’s military leadership from a battle-hardened general less than three weeks since the Wagner Rebellion, if true, indicates lingering discontent within the Russian military as it fights Europe’s largest land war since World War II.
the Russian army
Putin, Russia’s supreme leader since 1999, has said the rebellion threatens to push Russia into civil war and likened it to the revolutionary unrest of 1917.
The Kremlin has sought to show calm, but Russian officials and diplomats told Reuters the full consequences of the rebellion – which Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin said aimed only at settling scores with Shoigu and Gerasimov – had yet to be played out.
Neither Prigozhin nor General Sergei Surovkin, the deputy commander of Russia’s military operations in Ukraine, have been seen in public since the day of the mutiny.
For several months Prigozhin had been publicly insulting Putin’s top military men, using a variety of coarse insults and prison slang that shocked Russian officials, but neither Putin, nor Shoigu, nor Gerasimov responded to it publicly.
Popov, 48, said he faced a watershed moment when he told the army commanders the truth.
“There was a difficult situation with top managers in which it was necessary either to remain silent and cowardly, or to say the matter as it is,” said Popov. He did not say when the complaints were filed.
“I had no right to lie in your name, in the name of my fallen comrades-in-arms, so I outlined all the problems there.”
Military rebels?
In 2017, the Official Gazette of the Russian Armed Forces profiled Popov. It added that he had previously served in the Russian war against separatists in Chechnya and in the 2008 war in Georgia.
A telegram channel linked to Wagner’s mercenaries said that Popov had raised the need to rotate exhausted troops from the front line with Gerasimov. Reuters could not verify this report.
Major Russian state television channels did not run Popov’s remarks on their main news programs on Thursday, although the respected Russian newspaper Kommersant reported them.
War bloggers in Russia were divided between those who said that Popov’s remarks were an outright defiance and those who said that Popov was not a rebel but simply a highly respected general who had fallen out with senior officers.
“This is a dangerous precedent,” said Igor Girkin, a former FSB officer who helped Russia annex Crimea in 2014 and then organize pro-Russian militias in eastern Ukraine.
Popov said his future is now uncertain.
He said: “It seems that the senior commanders felt some kind of danger from me and quickly prepared an order from the Minister of Defense in just one day and got rid of me.” “I am waiting for my destiny.”
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