Gen. Sergei Surovikin, a former commander of Russia’s forces in Ukraine believed to be close to the mercenary warlord Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, was relieved of his duties as the chief of Russia’s Air Force, the Russian state media reported on Wednesday.
The report by RIA Novosti, a Russian state news agency, was the clearest sign yet that the Kremlin has cracked down on General Surovikin after Mr. Prigozhin’s brief rebellion in June.
“The ex-commander in chief of the Aerospace Forces of Russia, Sergei Surovikin has now been relieved of his post,” RIA Novosti said. It said that Col. Gen. Viktor Afzalov, chief of the air force’s general staff, had been named as the acting commander.
“Surovikin was relieved of his post in connection with the transfer to another job. He is now on a short vacation,” the RIA report added, citing a report from the Russian news outlet RBC.
Analysts have described General Surovikin, called “General Armageddon” for his ruthless tactics, as a brutally effective leader in a Russian military that even many Russian cheerleaders of the war have described as troubled by incompetence in its command structure. But his links to Mr. Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenary group, which took over a Russian city and began a march on Moscow in its brief mutiny, appeared to precipitate his fall from grace.
General Surovikin has not been seen in public since the rebellion and his whereabouts has remained a mystery. In July, Andrei Kartapolov, the head of the Russian Duma’s defense committee, said that General Surovikin was “taking a rest” in response to questions from a reporter.
U.S. officials believe that General Surovikin had advanced knowledge of Mr. Prigozhin’s rebellion. In the hours after the rebellion began, the Russian authorities quickly released a video of the general calling on the Wagner fighters to stand down.
Rumors have been circulating among Russia’s military bloggers, some of whom have close ties to Russian officials and the military, that General Surovikin had been under house arrest since the failed mutiny.
The reports about General Surovikin’s firing are “far from news for people in the know,” wrote Mikhail Zvinchuk, a popular pro-war Russian blogger who posts under the moniker Rybar on the messaging app Telegram. He added that General Surovikin lost his job immediately after Mr. Prigozhin’s rebellion.
General Surovikin was appointed to lead what Russian officials describe as its “special military operation” in Ukraine in October 2022 before being relieved of that job in January. In 2015, he commanded Russia’s forces during the country’s intervention in Syria, and he was the head of the Russian air force from 2017 onward.
General Surovikin’s replacement, General Afzalov, has been chief of the Air Force’s general staff since 2018, according to Russian state media, having risen through the ranks. He was “directly involved in planning and organizing” the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior ministry, in a post on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
General Afzalov had previously served as the interim commander of Russia’s air force while General Surovikin led Russia’s armed forces in Ukraine. Suspicions that General Afzalov had replaced General Surovikin were raised in July, when the former was shown in official video footage delivering an air force report to General Valery V. Gerasimov, Russia’s top military officer.
