The Reward for Putin’s Best Generals? Disgrace
In a small room within a military court in the town of Tambov, 300 miles southeast of Moscow, Major General Ivan Popov, wearing a grey T-shirt and military fatigue trousers, stood with his hands behind his back, listening to the judge’s verdict: five years in prison.
His was a precipitous fall from grace. Formerly commander of the 58th Guards Combined Arms Army (CAA), a central element of the Russian invasion force, and one of the country’s most popular senior officers, his request to be sent back to the front line in Ukraine was rejected. He was also stripped of his rank at the April 24 hearing.
Popov was arrested in May 2024 for allegedly misappropriating funds to reinforce defensive structures in Russian-occupied Ukraine.
Even his enemies disbelieved the charges — Popov was a general with genuine combat experience in Ukraine, but his very popularity doomed him.
If there’s one thing that frightens Vladimir Putin, it’s a popular general. He takes no chances with the military, despite the Kremlin’s official proclamations to the contrary.
Publicly, the Kremlin declares its admiration for returning servicemen, declaring them men of virtue destined for great things on their return home. The Russian veterans’ war retraining program, bombastically entitled “The Time of Heroes,” was launched by Putin a year ago as a supposed launchpad for a new, more patriotic, conservative, and loyal elite.
“This is our real gold reserve . . . Those who defend the Motherland. These are the people, this is the elite, this is the future, the future of the country. And it will not be scary to hand over the country to them, to such people,” he said on April 21 last year.
These words were music to the ears of many veterans, who saw the program as a real, government-aided chance to start a new career. But despite the Kremlin’s declaration that war veterans would be welcomed into government positions in Moscow and across Russia’s regions, the reality has proven very different. According to Russian media, only 83 people out of more than 44,000 passed the exam and were enrolled in the retraining program, and most were officers. As a symbol of reintegration and promotion, the numbers are pitiful.
The only veteran of the war in Ukraine who succeeded in Russian bureaucracy was Artyom Zhoga, a former commander of a separatist battalion in Donetsk — in October, Putin made him the presidential envoy to Russia’s Ural Federal District, a position with a status but without real powers.
There are plentiful indications why the program is failing; it’s being sabotaged by an entrenched bureaucracy profoundly hostile to new entrants. Some war veterans believed their combat experience would be an advantage did they decide to run for local office, but encountered problems. Take Dmitry Korovin, a neurosurgeon from Voronezh, a southern city, who was successfully running for the local city council when the veteran was pressured to withdraw. The local branch of United Russia, Putin’s ruling party, feared losing to what it viewed as an outsider.
The attack on Korovin highlights the wider issue. Russian wars — no matter how bloody or disastrous — have a habit of producing popular generals. And many of them, sooner or later, turn to politics.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979–1989) was a military and political failure, but it brought several politically ambitious officers to the fore. One was Alexander Rutskoy, who went on to become Boris Yeltsin’s vice president. In October 1993, when a group of revanchists challenged Yeltsin in central Moscow, Rutskoy emerged as one of its leaders.
The rebellion was suppressed with brutal force — tanks shelled the Russian parliament — and the fallout reshaped national politics: Yeltsin, and later Putin, eliminated the position of vice president altogether.
Another Afghan war veteran, General Alexander Lebed, nearly derailed Yeltsin’s bid for re-election in 1996. The Kremlin made a huge effort to outmaneuver him, eventually offering him the post of Secretary of the Security Council as a tradeoff.
In the turbulent North Caucasus, senior officers again rose to prominence. General Dzhokhar Dudaev, who had been a bomber pilot in Afghanistan and who later refused to crush the Estonian independence movement, led the Chechens during the first war in Chechnya and was later killed in a Russian airstrike. In neighboring Ingushetia, Ruslan Aushev, another officer who had made his name in Afghanistan, became the widely popular president and managed to keep his republic out of both Chechen wars by always playing his own game.
Two wars in Chechnya also produced their share of military strongmen. One, Lev Rokhlin, went into politics and became a member of the Duma, but also tried to create a political organization within the army. A fierce opponent of the Kremlin, he was rumored to have been preparing a coup d’état when, in July 1998, he was killed under mysterious circumstances. His wife — who initially confessed but later blamed masked men — was accused of shooting him in the head and was given a suspended sentence.
Even the short war with Georgia in August 2008 had the potential to elevate a military figure — had General Anatoly Khrulyov, commander of the 58th CAA, not been seriously wounded on the third day when he foolishly led a tank column into an ambush.
In short, in a country with little tradition of robust political debate — especially in institutions like parliament — wars have often served as a springboard for the strongest challengers to the Kremlin.
Suspicion toward ambitious generals remains ingrained among the Russian security services, where many still recall Marshal Georgy Zhukov, the greatest Russian military hero of World War II hero, who was sidelined after accusations of political ambitions, and even Leon Trotsky, who made his name as the founder of the Red Army during the Civil War.
Vladimir Putin understands this better than anyone, and unlike his predecessors, he made a deliberate effort to prevent the military commanders of the war in Ukraine from emerging as a potential threat to his regime.
Putin went to such great lengths that, in the early months of the war in 2022, it wasn’t even clear who was in charge of the Russian army group fighting in Ukraine. Eventually, General Sergey Surovikin emerged as the most recognizable figure — pro-Kremlin Telegram channels even coined the term “Surovikin Line” to describe Russian defensive fortifications in Ukraine.
But the Kremlin sidelined him after the Prigozhin mutiny, and he completely disappeared from public view.
When, in late February of this year, the question of his whereabouts was finally allowed to be raised, Duma member Viktor Sobolev — a former general himself — responded vaguely: “Somewhere in Africa, but I don’t know where exactly, because I never asked. But he is abroad.”
Somewhere in Africa may be the best that Putin’s competent generals can hope for.
Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.