Russia's Disappearing Generals: Purges, Loyalty Tests, and the Wagner Fallout

Russia’s war in Ukraine has inflicted devastating, and often unforeseen consequences on every side of the conflict. On the battlefield, tens of thousands of troops have died on both sides of a war that was initially expected to be over within weeks, while Ukrainian civilians and Russian oligarchs alike have found themselves under siege. Europe has been forced to wean itself off Russian energy sources decades earlier than expected, and impoverished and isolated communities around the world have found themselves clinging to a lifeline of Ukrainian grain that may well be about to sever completely. But there is one group of casualties that has perhaps been most surprising of all: Russia’s own military leaders, who have faced unprecedented turmoil within their own ranks.

The Assassination of Stanislav Rzhitsky and Ukraine’s Targeted Killings

On July 10, 2023, a Russian draft officer and former submarine commander named Stanislav Rzhitsky was shot by a gunman during his morning run, in a local park in the city of Krasnodar in southern Russia. Although such a brazen attack, done inside Russia, almost certainly would have been difficult to pull off, it has since come out that Rzhitsky logged his daily runs, including their route, on a social media app called Strava. It was a misstep so obvious that an account bearing the name of Ukraine’s head of national intelligence liked one of his posted runs in the hours after his death, before the world even realized that the submarine captain’s Strava account existed.

But it was also the culmination of a months-long effort to track him down, after his address, picture, and personal information had appeared alongside hundreds of others on a Ukrainian website called Myrotvorets, or Peacemaker — a well-established blacklist that lists known or suspected perpetrators of war crimes during the Russian invasion. It was one of only a few targeted assassinations inside Russia believed to have been carried out by Ukraine, and the first against a high-ranking military officer. Journalist Darya Dugan, daughter of Russian ideologue Aleksandr Dugan, and war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky have died under similarly suspicious circumstances, but by and large, Russia’s military class had found itself immune from reprisal within their home country.

Although around fifteen other Russian generals have been suspected or confirmed killed in Ukraine, these have been combat losses, either in front-line battles, missile strikes, or other similar circumstances.

Wagner’s March on Moscow and the Crisis of Loyalty

On the Russian home front, things are a lot more murky, and the current situation seems to stem from one key event: the attempted coup that took place within Russia in late June 2023, perpetrated by a paramilitary organization known as the Wagner Group. The Wagner Group embarked on a charge toward the Russian capital city, in a move whose ultimate target is still unclear: either Russian Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu, or Vladimir Putin himself. The coup attempt ended before it ever reached Moscow, but it appears to have brought up deep questions of national loyalty within Russia’s military brass, and emboldened other important Russians to speak out against the status quo in a way they had not done before.

In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, open defiance is a potentially grave error, and many analysts in Russia and the West alike have reason to believe that Putin’s grip on power is slipping. The modern-day tsar has made it abundantly clear that he fully intends to retain his authority for as long as he can manage. His purge, to the extent that a purge exists, appears to have started with the leader of the Wagner coup himself.

Reeling from the aftereffects of the Wagner Group’s march on Moscow in late June, Russia’s military elite have found themselves personal targets of their own regime, in ways that, at least from the outside, can be difficult to fully assess. Russia’s generals have faced a predicament, and Vladimir Putin’s end-game is uncertain.

The Strange Odyssey of Yevgeny Prigozhin

In the hours following Wagner’s sudden halt on the way to Moscow, no question loomed larger than the fate of Yevgeny Prigozhin. Once a prominent oligarch known as Putin’s Chef, Prigozhin had been the public face of the Wagner Group for years prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and once the invasion kicked off, Prigozhin became one of the most recognizable characters of the entire Russian war effort. But with his fighters turning back from Moscow, Prigozhin was seen on the night of his failed coup stepping into a Wagner SUV and being driven out of the city of Rostov-on-Don, his future entirely unknown.

In the days following the coup, British intelligence officials revealed that the families of Prigozhin and his top associates may have been used as leverage in forcing Wagner’s column to turn back. They also revealed that the Wagner Group’s military column may have been significantly smaller than initially believed — about eight thousand fighters, rather than the twenty-five thousand that Prigozhin had claimed. But what Western intelligence either did not know, or chose not to reveal, was the whereabouts of Prigozhin himself.

An audio message purportedly recorded by the Wagner leader raised more questions than answers, around whether such a message might have been coerced, or whether, in a world dealing with better and better AI deep-fake technology, the recording may have been fabricated entirely. First, Prigozhin was supposed to end up in Russia’s neighbor and ally, Belarus, but was instead reported by Russian media as having shown up at his business offices in St. Petersburg.

Then, news broke that not just Prigozhin, but his senior lieutenants had met with Vladimir Putin personally, in a meeting that, as far as can be determined, everybody left alive. Shortly afterward, photographs emerged from a purported Russian raid on Prigozhin’s mansion, also in St. Petersburg, showing Prigozhin wearing a variety of odd disguises, including long beards and stick-on mustaches.

And just days later, as Vladimir Putin took to Russian state media and proclaimed that the Wagner Group had never existed as a legal entity within Russia at all, another image began to circulate, of Prigozhin sitting in a tent in little more than his underwear. At the same time, Prigozhin’s so-called Internet Research Agency, a troll factory working on social media and news websites, appears to have come under control of Russian authorities, and now works to actively flood Russian social media platforms with criticisms of their former boss. Even amidst what appears to be Russia’s attempts to discredit Prigozhin, or perhaps portray him as an eccentric, the authenticity of any of these appearances or statements remains uncertain.

His travels to St. Petersburg are catalogued in reports issued by Russian state media; it is exceedingly difficult to determine when any pictures of Prigozhin were taken, even by examining metadata; and although the movements of his personal jet are easier to confirm, there is no real way to verify his presence on board.

Prigozhin Resurfaces in Belarus — and Dmitry Utkin Emerges from the Shadows

On July 19, 2023, footage circulated on Russian Telegram channels in which a shadowy figure believed to be Prigozhin appeared in a Wagner camp in Belarus. Although the footage was shot in low light, with little visible except his silhouette, the combination of his profile, his voice, his mannerisms, and his surroundings — recognizable for military analysts familiar with this camp — would suggest that Prigozhin is indeed the man featured. During the clip, Prigozhin denounces the situation on Russia’s front lines in Ukraine, but says nothing against his long-time enemies Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu or General Valery Gerasimov.

Just as important as what he does not say, is what he does: that the Wagner Group will pivot toward strengthening its longtime operations in Africa and elsewhere, while avoiding Ukraine. Perhaps that will be Prigozhin’s place now — an exile, leading an army of exiles. The footage also appeared to resolve questions about another disappeared Russian military leader: Dmitry Utkin.

While Prigozhin is the public face of the Wagner Group, it has long been Dmitry Utkin who runs the group behind the scenes. It is even named after his personal call-sign, Wagner. As a military leader, Utkin stays almost completely out of the spotlight, due in part to some aspects of his appearance, including Nazi tattoos across his body, that make him a somewhat less palatable option to represent Wagner.

Before July 19, Utkin had not made a public appearance within the last several years, but the aftermath of Wagner’s coup attempt appears to have brought him, however briefly, back into the light. In the July 19 footage, Prigozhin introduces an unnamed, silhouetted figure as “the commander, and the person who gave us the name Wagner,” a description that can only really apply to Utkin. In the weeks after Wagner’s march on Moscow, Utkin’s fate had been in question; after all, if he is the battlefield commander that Wagner says he is, then it would have been his personal responsibility to lead Wagner’s column to Moscow.

Now that he seems to have shown up, he, too, appears to have escaped reprisal thus far.

General Armageddon Vanishes: The Disappearance of Sergey Surovikin

Not all of Prigozhin’s supporters have been so lucky, and especially not those who have explicitly sworn loyalty to Russia’s Ministry of Defense. Sergey Surovikin got his early start during a 1991 coup d’etat attempt in Moscow, where Surovikin made his name by commanding the only unit of the Russian military to have killed civilian protesters. In the 2010s, Surovikin oversaw Russia’s destruction, by air, of the Syrian city of Aleppo, including devastating and deliberate attacks on civilian targets.

He commanded troops who deployed sarin gas, his fighters were involved with attacks on civilians in the Russian region of Chechnya, and in 2017, he also earned Russia’s highest military honor, the Hero of Russia Medal, bestowed on him by Putin himself. In Ukraine, he spent months overseeing the entire Russian invasion, and since January, he had been a right-hand man to General Valery Gerasimov. Surovikin is a friend not just to Yevgeny Prigozhin, but to Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov; he has a reputation for personally beating up his own subordinates, and he is perhaps best known by his nickname: “General Armageddon.”

But General Armageddon has not been seen since the day of Prigozhin’s fateful coup attempt, and Western sources report that this might be because Surovikin had advance warning about the coup before it took place. In the wake of the march on Moscow, Surovikin was alleged to have been regarded as a “secret” VIP member of the Wagner Group for years before the coup, even being granted a Wagner registration number. Although other Russian military and intelligence leaders are suspected to have been granted this same, rather dubious honor, Surovikin is the only one who has been named.

On the day of the coup, Surovikin appeared in a video directed squarely at Prigozhin. Holding a machine gun, and appearing nervous as he spoke, General Armageddon pleaded for Prigozhin to end his assault. His seemingly scripted remarks, and his halting delivery as he gave them, led to widespread speculation that he may have been coerced or compelled to create it.

And then he disappeared, completely. The closest thing to actual information on his whereabouts comes from Russian Duma legislator Andrei Kartapolov, who heads the Duma’s Defense Committee. When asked by a reporter about Surovikin’s whereabouts, Kartapolov responded: “Surovikin is currently resting.

He is not available for now.” Russian prison organizations have denied that Surovikin has been imprisoned, and his daughter was allegedly interviewed on Telegram, claiming she was in contact with her father and that he was not detained. The veracity of this recording, and any circumstances behind its creation, are completely unknown.

There is no evidence to suggest he has survived at all. If he is alive, he may very well be detained indefinitely. In the case of a general who has committed some of the worst atrocities of the modern era and been thanked for his work by Vladimir Putin, his disappearance is a statement of exceptional magnitude.

If that same Vladimir Putin is now willing to make an example of him, probably in order to tamp down on dissent overall, then the underlying message is unmistakable: nobody betrays Putin and gets away with it.

Major General Ivan Popov: Dismissed for Speaking Out

Surovikin is not the only former Putin ally to have been punished after the coup. Major General Ivan Popov, Commander of the 58th Army in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, is an anomaly among Russian generals, partly because of his unusual levels of closeness with his troops and a relative unwillingness to pay for his battlefield results with Russian lives. After Prigozhin’s coup attempt, Popov loudly voiced his criticism of Putin’s military leadership, specifically their failure to provide radar technology to track enemy artillery attacks, and his troops’ urgent need for rest after constant fighting.

But within a day of his statements, Popov would find himself out of a job, in a move that international observers believe will have a devastating effect on troop morale. Although Popov has since been shown verbal support by Kremlin officials and other Russian leaders, that does not appear to outweigh the Ministry of Defense’s instincts to eliminate such a high-profile source of criticism. After the seismic shock that the Wagner uprising sent through Russian leadership, not least because of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s own willingness to rail against the Russian MoD’s senior leaders directly, Popov’s public complaints have been treated not as a request for better support, but a point that other disaffected leaders could repeat and amplify, if they are not dissuaded from doing so.

Although his requests appear to be consistent with his own prior leadership style, Popov’s dismissal strongly suggests that Minister Shoigu and his inner circle would prefer to ensure that no new opposition leader comes around, who can give voice to the same frustrations that Prigozhin could.

Gerasimov’s Uncertain Standing at the Top of Russia’s War Command

There is still one more general caught up in this turmoil, and lest the entire story appear to be a purge done by Putin’s highest-ranking officials, one of them appears to have been caught up in the mess as well. That would be Valery Gerasimov, commander of Russia’s war in Ukraine, close ally of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, mortal enemy of Yevgeny Prigozhin, and one of the three men in Russia with the ability to launch the country’s nuclear arsenal. Gerasimov has been a lightning rod for criticism by Prigozhin, and also from leaders like Ivan Popov, other high-ranking Russian military figures, and the country’s many military bloggers.

During Wagner’s march to Moscow, one of the group’s most major demands was that Gerasimov be personally delivered to them, and while that was not confirmed to have happened, Gerasimov went weeks after Wagner’s coup attempt without being seen once. Gerasimov did resurface on July 10, when the Russian defense ministry released footage in which Gerasimov received a report about identification of places where Ukraine’s missiles are stored. But critically, this was well over two weeks since the Wagner coup had ended, two weeks in which, for all the world knew, Gerasimov may well have lost his job or even his life.

Prigozhin’s accusations that Gerasimov had fed Vladimir Putin false information about wartime successes was damning on its own, but there is a very real possibility that a person like Gerasimov, who has angered such powerful Russians that Putin now has to deal with coup attempts, simply is not worth the trouble of keeping around. Considering the still-murky terms of the deal that saw Wagner end their attack, there was a non-zero chance that Gerasimov had been handed over to Wagner as requested, a massive bargaining chip that Putin might have traded in exchange for a quick end to the mutiny. The simple fact that Gerasimov has shown up alive does not mean that any of those scenarios are ruled out.

According to pro-Russian military bloggers, Gerasimov may be maintaining his position just as a formality, with a new leader, Colonel-General Mikhail Teplinsky, running things behind the scenes.

A Purge Across All Factions — and the Implications for Putin’s Grip on Power

With all these shakeups within the Russian elite, the country’s war effort in Ukraine is fundamentally different from what it was just a couple of months prior. The head of Russia’s private army has suffered a major loss of power and prestige, but has been allowed to live; so has the man who leads Wagner’s operations on the ground, and quite possibly drove his own tank directly toward Moscow. But two other Russian generals have not been so lucky: Surovikin, who appeared to work with Wagner from inside the formal military, and Popov, who became a voice for the same dissent Prigozhin encouraged, even after Prigozhin was taken out of the picture.

And finally, there is Valery Gerasimov, who, depending on who you ask, might be responsible for this whole breakdown in the first place. When Prigozhin, Popov, and presumably Surovikin all break their silence because Gerasimov is simply too ineffectual a leader to tolerate, it is difficult to punish the people pointing out the problem without fixing the problem itself. Russian Telegram news-feed Rybar has suggested that all these generals, on every side of their internal disputes, have been caught up in a purge; in Rybar’s words, “The armed rebellion of PMC ‘Wagner’ became the reason for large-scale purges in the ranks of the Russian Federation Armed Forces and a crash test of the ministry for loyalty.”

If that is true, then it goes to confirm Western suspicions about just how much Wagner’s coup attempt really mattered — that even if the coup itself failed to topple Vladimir Putin, it was a devastating first blow in the war it will take to bring him down. With dissent growing louder and louder among the Russian elite, and with their arguments now taking place in the open before the Russian people, it seems entirely likely that Putin and his inner circle are redoubling their efforts to cling to power. At the same time, it goes to show just how much power Yevgeny Prigozhin and his Wagner Group may still hold in Moscow.

Prigozhin and his military leader Utkin led a direct charge on the Russian capital, and whether Putin was the target or not, Prigozhin’s actions disrupted his authority in a way Putin would never have tolerated in years past. But by all accounts, Prigozhin and Utkin still live, and will continue their work with Wagner around the world, protecting Russian assets. They have escaped something that General Surovikin apparently could not, even though Surovikin was a ruthlessly effective leader for the Russian military, one who kept Putin’s support even after committing horrific war crimes in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Nor could General Popov get away with saying a far more diluted version of what Prigozhin did. Even though his removal will almost certainly devastate troop morale, he is out, while Prigozhin has lost prestige but seems to have kept the bulk of his military power outside Ukraine. Gerasimov, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, and others appear to have suffered a significant loss of power, but when General Popov was dismissed for calling out the Ministry of Defense, it was Gerasimov and the rest of the MoD’s highest tier that he was really calling out — and it was Gerasimov, and the MoD’s highest tier, that was protected by Popov’s removal, even as their war effort is likely to suffer even more in Popov’s absence.

Deep in the shadowy palace rooms of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the military old guard have managed to cling to power, though their grip is slipping; any hint of internal dissent or betrayal has been stamped out without remorse. But the head of Russia’s paramilitary organization appears to be beyond reprisal, even after making moves that any country would consider treasonous. In the center of it all is Vladimir Putin — a dictator whose unquestioned authority appears to be waning.

Putin must appease his generals, or else he will lose the war effort; he must appease Prigozhin, or he will lose the valuable global assets that the Wagner Group watches over. And he must maintain this delicate balance while his generals and Prigozhin both appear to be moving against each other’s power bases, and at the same time, while Putin must maintain some semblance of balance for the oligarch class that keeps the Russian state on its feet. As more and more of Russia’s elite is thrown into turmoil, it becomes more and more obvious that Vladimir Putin’s grip, eventually, shall fail.

Frequently Asked Questions

What triggered the disappearances and dismissals of Russian generals after Wagner’s march on Moscow?

The Wagner Group’s late-June 2023 mutiny exposed deep fissures of loyalty within Russia’s military hierarchy. Putin’s response appears to have been a broad purge aimed at eliminating anyone with ties to Wagner or who publicly criticized military leadership. Russian Telegram channel Rybar described it as “large-scale purges in the ranks of the Russian Federation Armed Forces and a crash test of the ministry for loyalty,” sweeping up generals on all sides of the internal dispute.

What happened to General Sergey Surovikin after the Wagner coup?

Surovikin, known as “General Armageddon,” appeared in a seemingly scripted video on the day of the coup pleading with Prigozhin to stand down — then vanished completely. Western sources reported that he had advance knowledge of the coup and was allegedly a secret VIP member of the Wagner Group with an assigned registration number. A Russian Duma official said only that Surovikin was “resting” and “not available,” Russian prison organizations denied he was imprisoned, and his whereabouts remain unverified.

Why was Major General Ivan Popov fired so quickly after the Wagner coup?

Popov, commander of the 58th Army in Zaporizhzhia, was dismissed within a day of publicly criticizing Russia’s military leadership for failing to provide radar technology to track enemy artillery and denying his troops needed rest. Coming immediately after Prigozhin’s own very public attacks on the Ministry of Defense, Popov’s complaints were treated not as legitimate requests but as potential rallying points for further dissent. His firing sent a clear signal that any criticism of military leadership would not be tolerated.

How did Prigozhin and Dmitry Utkin apparently survive the fallout?

Despite leading what any government would consider treason, Prigozhin met with Putin personally after the coup — a meeting everyone left alive — and later appeared in footage at a Wagner camp in Belarus on July 19, 2023. Utkin, the shadowy military commander for whom Wagner is named, also appeared in that footage. British intelligence suggested families of Wagner leaders may have been used as leverage to end the march, and the group’s column was estimated at only 8,000 fighters rather than Prigozhin’s claimed 25,000, which may have limited Putin’s fear of moving against them directly.

What does the fate of Gerasimov reveal about Putin’s post-coup power dynamics?

Gerasimov, one of the three men in Russia with nuclear launch authority, disappeared for over two weeks after the Wagner coup before resurfacing on July 10. Prigozhin, Popov, and Surovikin all criticized Gerasimov’s leadership, yet it was the critics who were punished while Gerasimov retained his position. Pro-Russian military bloggers suggest Gerasimov may now be a figurehead with Colonel-General Mikhail Teplinsky running operations behind the scenes — a face-saving arrangement that protects the Ministry of Defense’s authority even as its battlefield competence remains questioned.

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