By
Andrew Stuttaford
Thursday,
July 13, 2023
It seems
fair to assume that much of Russia’s elite are spending a lot of time
calculating where things stand in the wake of Prigozhin’s mutiny and its curiously
muted aftermath.
Under the circumstances, the fact that one senior general has decided to speak
out is . . . interesting.
A top Russian general has accused army chiefs of betraying his troops on
the southern front line in the first public outburst from a senior member of
Moscow’s military.
The unprecedented remarks from Major General Ivan Popov came after he
was sacked
for criticising the defence ministry. Maj Gen Popov had been commanding Russia’s
58th Combined Arms Army as it fought off Ukraine’s counter-offensive
in the key Zaporizhzhia region, where he said his exhausted troops had not been allowed to rest or
given adequate artillery support.
“The Ukrainian army
could not break through our ranks at the front but our senior chief hit us from the rear, viciously
beheading the army at the most difficult and intense moment,” he said in an
audio message posted on Telegram on Wednesday.
“The senior chiefs apparently sensed some kind of danger from me and
quickly concocted an order from the defence minister in just one day and got
rid of me. I await my fate.”
Maj Gen Popov
is the first senior Russian army commander to be sacked for insubordination since the
beginning of the war.
His sacking and subsequent outburst is evidence of growing
discontent within
the Russian army which has been steadily eroded during Vladimir Putin’s
invasion.
For a
general to complain to his superiors about the way a war is going is hardly
unusual. Nor is it surprising that, after making his views known, he was fired,
although the way that Popov phrases that reaction is worth noting:
The senior chiefs apparently sensed some kind of danger from me and
quickly concocted an order from the defence minister in just one day and got
rid of me
In other
words, Popov is implying that the reason for his firing was not his advice, but
nervousness about where his loyalties lay. That may or may not be true, but
that Popov felt that it was an explanation that people might believe is worth
noting.
And so
is the fact that, rather than quietly “awaiting his fate,” he has gone public.
Back to
the Daily Telegraph:
Reports from Russian army units have said that many ordinary soldiers
sympathise with the Wagner rebels and Prigozhin.
Grey Zone, a Telegram channel linked to the Wagner Group, was the first
to report late on Wednesday evening that Maj Gen Popov had been fired after
complaining about conditions on the front line.
It said the
Wagner rebellion had
“united a huge part of the army” and that soldiers were beginning to speak out.
“The removal of Popov is a monstrous act of terrorism against morale in
the army,” it said.
Analysts have said that Putin is increasingly worried about the loyalty
of his army, especially since the failed Wagner
mutiny when
the regular military largely failed to defend Russian cities.
Again,
one of the central mysteries of the mutiny remains the question of why it met
so little pushback from Russian forces.
Also at
the Daily Telegraph, Roy Oliphant digs deeper. He argues that Popov may not have
meant his message to go public. Apparently, “it was first sent in private to a
former general and MP in Putin’s party.”
Yes, but
the message was an address by Popov to his troops, and
that MP is Andrei
Gurulyov, a
hard-liner who has already talked about missile
strikes in
Alaska and is a
former deputy commander of the Southern Military District. Gurulyov is also on
record as
having said that Moscow had not taken things far enough in World War II (“we
have to draw the conclusion that we didn’t take it far enough in 1945. Today,
we have to keep pushing to make sure there is no danger and trouble for our
country ever again”).
Those
remarks also included the (accurate) observation that “this is by far not about
Ukraine” and this:
Russia was, is, and will be a great nation, capable of bringing peace. Peace
is the key word! We bring peace and calm!”
Peace
and calm.
That
evokes the comments (quoted by Tacitus) by, supposedly, Calcagus, a Caledonian chieftain, that the
Romans “make a desert and call it peace.”
If Popov
sent Gurulyov a message, he cannot have expected it to remain confidential.
Nor, surely, can he have expected those of his troops who heard it to keep it
to themselves.
Meanwhile, via
the Wall Street Journal:
Hours after Russian paramilitary leader Yevgeny
Prigozhin began a short-lived
march on Moscow,
the country’s domestic security service detained several high-ranking military
officers, including Gen. Sergei Surovikin, head of aerospace forces,
people familiar with the situation said.
Surovikin, known as
General Armageddon for
bombing campaigns he waged in Syria, is being held and interrogated in Moscow,
the people said. He hasn’t been charged with a crime. One said Surovikin knew
about plans for the insurrection but that the general wasn’t involved in the
June 24 mutiny.
The Kremlin’s effort to weed out
officers suspected
of disloyalty is broader than publicly known, according to the people, who said
at least 13 senior officers were detained for questioning, with some later
released, and around 15 suspended from duty or fired.
“The detentions are about cleaning the ranks of those who it is
believed can’t be trusted anymore,” one said.
I’m not
convinced that knowing about the planned mutiny and (if this was the case)
doing nothing about it is an ideal defense.
Reportedly
(but who knows?), neither Popov nor Gurulyov are close to Prigozhin. If true,
that may well suggest that Prigozhin knew that his long-standing criticism of
the way the war was being fought (and, perhaps, his later
criticism of
the war itself) would resonate with Russia’s regular army, and gambled
accordingly.
Once
again, who knows, but it’s obvious that the aftershocks of Prigozhin’s march
have not died down.
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