General Sergei Surovikin, dismissed as head of the Russian Aerospace Forces, has been seen in public for the first time since the armed rebellion led in June by the late head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin.
The Telegram channel of the well-known journalist Xenia Sobchak published on Monday afternoon a photograph in which the controversial general appears walking through the streets of Moscow dressed in civilian clothes and with his wife holding his arm.
"General Sergei Surovikin went out into the streets. Safe and sound, at home, with his family, in Moscow," Sobchak writes in the message.
Since Prigozhin's death on August 23, exactly two months after the uprising, the press and social networks have speculated about the general's condition and whereabouts.
Surovikin, known as General Armageddon for his role in the terrible bombardments against the rebels in the Syrian civil war, fell out of favor after the failed armed rebellion led by Prigozhin, who at the time acknowledged having personally planned the operation with said general to take the city of Bakhmut (Donetsk), something that the mercenaries achieved last May.
When criticizing the General Staff and the Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, Prigozhin assured that with Surovikin in command his men would never have had problems with the supply of equipment and ammunition, for which he repeatedly blamed the first two. After the coup, there was speculation that the general knew the mercenary leader's plans.
Since the Wagner uprising on June 23-24, Surovikin has disappeared from the public eye, although in mid-July a deputy, Andrei Kartapolov, assured: "He is resting." The Kremlin never confirmed the general's arrest for supporting the mutiny, which was also refuted by his own daughter.
On the morning of the same day that Prigozhin's private plane crashed, it became known that Surovikin had been replaced as head of the Aerospace Forces by General Victor Afzalov.
Surovikin assumed the leadership of the troops fighting in Ukraine in October last year, but after ordering the withdrawal of the northern third of the Ukrainian region of Kherson, he was replaced in January 2023 by the chief of the General Staff, Valeri Gerasimov.
Some supporters of Prigozhin, who was secretly buried a week ago, accuse President Vladimir Putin of being behind his death. A hypothesis that many Western foreign ministries do not rule out either.
