A senior Russian general knew in advance of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plan to rebel against Russia’s military leadership, according to US officials who briefed US intelligence on the matter, which put raised the question of what support for this mercenary leader in the highest ranks.
Officials said they were trying to find out whether General Sergei Surovikin, a former top Russian commander in Ukraine, helped plan Mr. Prigozhin’s actions last weekend, which caused the most serious threat to President Vladimir V. Putin during his 23 years in power.
Analysts say General Surovikin is a respected military leader who helped bolster defenses across the front lines following Ukraine’s counter-offensive last year. He was replaced as top commander in January but retained influence in running war operations and remained a favorite of the military.
U.S. officials also said there are indications that other Russian generals may also have supported Prigozhin’s effort to change the Defense Department leadership by force. Current and former US officials have said Mr Prigozhin will not launch his own uprising unless he believes others in positions of power will support him.
If General Surovikin was involved in last weekend’s events, it would be the latest sign of the infighting that has characterized Russia’s military leadership since the start of Putin’s war in Ukraine and could signal a wider rift between Mr Prigozhin’s supporters and him. Two senior military advisers to Putin: Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu and General Valery V. Gerasimov, Chief of the General Staff.
Officials said Putin must now decide whether he believes General Surovikin helped Prigozhin and how he should react.
On Tuesday, Russia’s domestic intelligence service said it was dropping criminal charges of “armed mutiny” against Prigozhin and members of his forces. But if Putin finds evidence that General Surovikin directly helped Prigozhin, he will have little choice but to remove him from his command, officials and analysts said.
Some former officials say that Putin may decide to keep General Surovikin, if he concludes that he knew something about Prigozhin’s plans but did not support him. For now, analysts say, Putin seems intent on blaming Prigozhin only for the mutiny.
“Putin is reluctant to change people,” said Alexander Baunov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Center for Eurasia. “But if the secret service puts the files on Putin’s desk and if some of the files involve Surovikin, that could change.”
Senior US officials say the alliance between General Surovikin and Prigozhin could explain why Prigozhin is still alive, despite seizing a major Russian military center and ordering an armed operation in Moscow.
American officials and others interviewed for this article spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence. They emphasize that much of what the United States and its allies know is preliminary. U.S. officials have avoided public discussion of the uprising, fearing it will expose Mr. Putin’s story that the unrest was orchestrated by the West.
However, American officials remained interested in releasing information that undermined the position of General Surovikin, whom they considered more capable and ruthless than other members of the command. His removal would certainly benefit Ukraine, whose Western-backed army is stepping up a new counter-offensive to try to regain territory already seized by Moscow.
The Russian Embassy did not respond to a request for comment.
General Surovikin spoke out against the uprising when it became public on Friday, in a video calling on Russian troops in Ukraine to stay in their positions and not join the uprising.
“I urge you to stop,” General Surovikin said in a statement posted on Telegram. “The enemy is just waiting for the internal political situation to worsen in our country.”
But one former official called the message “a video of a hostage”. General Surovikin’s body language showed he was uncomfortable denouncing a former ally who shared his views on the Russian military leadership, the former official said.
There are other signs of divided loyalties within the top ranks. Another Russian general – Lieutenant General Vladimir Alekseyev – issued his own video appeal, calling any action against the Russian state a “stabbing in the back of the country and the president”. But hours later, he appeared in another video, chatting with Mr. Prigozhin in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, where Wagner fighters occupied military facilities.
Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia, said in a phone interview: “So many strange things happened that, to my mind, suggest collusion that we haven’t figured out yet. .
“Think about how easy it was to take Rostov,” Mr. McFaul said. “There are armed guards everywhere in Russia, and all of a sudden, there’s no one around to do anything?”
Independent experts, U.S. and allied officials say that Prigozhin appears to believe that most of the Russian army will rally toward him as his convoy heads toward Moscow.
Mr. Prigozhin worked with General Surovikin during Russia’s military intervention in Syria and has described him as the most capable commander in the Russian military. Former officials said General Surovikin was not in favor of ousting Putin from power but appeared to agree with Prigozhin that Shoigu and General Gerasimov should be dismissed.
Dara Massicot, senior policy researcher at RAND Corporation, said: “Surovikin is an honored general with a complicated history. “It is said that he is respected by the soldiers and is considered a capable man.”
General Surovikin and Mr. Prigozhin have both opposed Mr. Shoigu and General Gerasimov over the tactics used in Ukraine. While the overall performance of the Russian military in the war has been derided by many as being too low, analysts have credited General Surovikin and Mr. Prigozhin for Russia’s meager successes.
In the case of General Surovikin, that limited success was the professionally managed retreat of Russian troops from Kherson, where they were almost surrounded last fall and cut off from their supplies. Based on intercepted communications, U.S. officials concluded that the frustrated General Surovikin represented a hardline faction of generals intent on using the toughest tactics against the Ukrainians.
Likewise, Prigozhin’s Wagner mercenaries achieved some success in capturing the eastern city of Bakhmut after nine months of tenacious fighting, of which, according to Prigozhin’s own statistics, around 20,000 Wagner’s army was killed. US officials and military analysts say tens of thousands of troops have been killed in the battle for Bakhmut, among them Wagner soldiers who were prisoners and received little training before they were dispatched. fighting. Mr. Prigozhin regularly complains that senior Russian military and defense officials do not provide enough weapons for his army.
The entire Russian military campaign in Ukraine is characterized by a general replacement musical. Last fall, when General Surovikin was put in charge of the Russian Army’s effort in Ukraine, he was the second person to take the job, replacing a new general who had been in the job for less than a month. General Surovikin did not last much longer, but performed much better in the weeks he was in power.
In January, however, General Surovikin was demoted and Putin gave direct command of the war to General Gerasimov, who promised to bring Russian forces back into the offensive. Military and Russian analysts say the dismissal of General Surovikin is seen by many as a blow to Prigozhin.
