Vladimir Putin's reported appointment of "inferior" Colonel-General Alexander Lapin could herald further issues for Moscow's war efforts in Ukraine, experts have suggested to Newsweek.
On Tuesday, Russian state news agency TASS reported that General Lapin had been "appointed as Chief of the Russian Army Main Staff," attributing the quote only to a "source" at the Defense Ministry.
The report continued that "another source" claimed the appointment had been made before the new year.
Following the report on Russian state media, a second article appeared on TASS in which Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said he could neither "confirm nor deny" the appointment.
He told reporters on Tuesday that "there are public presidential decrees and there are also classified ones," according to TASS.
"There has been no such decree among the public ones yet," the state media outlet quoted the spokesman as saying.
Colonel-General Lapin was awarded the title of Hero of Russia by Vladimir Putin on July 4, 2022, in what the Russian President's office called "courage and heroism" in his military duty.
However, when the Russian tide started to turn and Moscow's forces retreated from the Donetsk city of Lyman, Lapin was reported to have abandoned his troops in the eastern city and its fall back to Ukrainian control "was blamed on Lapin's mismanagement," Dr Marina Miron, of King's College London's Center for Military Ethics, told Newsweek.
But he was then reported to have been removed from his command of Russia's Central Military District in October 2022.
The general had been "widely criticised for poor performance on the battlefield in Ukraine by both Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and Wagner head Yevgeny Prigozhin," the British Defense Ministry said on November 6.
"If confirmed, this follows a series of dismissals of senior Russian military commanders since the onset of the invasion in February 2022. The Commanders of the Eastern, Southern, and Western Military Districts were replaced earlier this year," the government department added at the time.
The U.K.'s defense ministry called the string of high-profile dismissals a likely "attempt to insulate and deflect blame from Russian senior leadership at home" that formed a "pattern of blame" for Russian military failures in Ukraine.
Chechen strongman Kadyrov and the Wagner leader "are pushing out key personnel" from Russian high military command, including Lapin, after they "targeted him for dismissal by publicly showering him with criticism," Peter Rough and Can Kasapoglu of the Hudson Institute think tank wrote in Foreign Policy on December 22.
Lapin had been at the helm of Russia's Central Military District after commanding Russian troops in Syria, according to Russian independent investigative outlet, Meduza.
The outlet reported that Kadyrov had labelled the colonel-general "talentless" following the Russian retreat from the Donetsk city of Lyman in the fall.
"If it were up to me, I'd demote Lapin to a private, strip his awards, and send him to the front with a gun in his hands so he could wash away his disgrace with blood," Kadyrov is quoted as saying.
But just as scathing of Lapin is Prigozhin, who is desperate to show that "Lapin and the Russian military are inferior to his own elite forces," according to Miron.
With Putin needing to "appease" his hardliners yet maintain control, she added, the alleged appointment of Lapin on Tuesday could be a way to counterbalance Prigozhin's influence.
But, crucially, the "events on the ground will further influence the political climate in the Kremlin, especially if the Wagner forces manage to take Soledar and Bakhmut," Miron predicted.
This may threaten Putin's own rule, she argued, as the Kremlin leader tries to plot a course that satisfies the most hawkish without upsetting the General Staff.
"Only time will tell if Lapin has any effect and in what way," former British Army Lieutenant Colonel Glen Grant, who is now a defense analyst for the Baltic Security Foundation, told Newsweek.
The Russian Ministry of Defense has been contacted for comment.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Ellie Cook is a Newsweek security and defense reporter based in London, U.K. Her work focuses largely on the Russia-Ukraine ... Read more
