Russian Army General Sergei Surovikin has been appointed commander of the Joint Group of Forces in the area of the so-called "special military operation." It is reported by TASS.
Prior to that, Surovikin headed the southern military district.
In 1991, by decision of the State Emergency Committee, Surovikin personally led a column of armored vehicles, which crushed people during the August coup. Then three defenders of the "White House" were killed: Vladimir Usov, Dmitry Komar and Ilya Krichevsky. According to the official version, in the tunnel under Novy Arbat, “the column was stopped by the crowd, blockages were built on the road. Surovikin addressed the crowd with warnings... demanded to let the convoy through and fired two warning shots upward from his service weapon. Then, with a part of the convoy, he broke through the rubble and left the place of conflict, and during the continued attacks of the crowd on the remaining military vehicles, three young people were killed, ” recalls Alexander Cherkasov, a member of the board of the Memorial Human Rights Center, for Novaya Gazeta. Europe". According to RIA Novosti, after that Surovikin ended up in the Matrosskaya Tishina pre-trial detention center, but soon Boris Yeltsin personally ordered the release of Surovikin.
In 1995, Surovikin was found guilty of several crimes at once: aiding, acquiring and selling, as well as carrying firearms and ammunition without a permit. These articles of the Criminal Code provided for up to 8 years in prison, but, as Radio Liberty notes , the sentence turned out to be humane: one year of imprisonment on probation. Later, “when the investigation figured out that the officer had been set up, the charge was dropped and the criminal record was extinguished,” writes Proekt. The Project also reported that in March 2004, Lieutenant Colonel Tsibizov accused the division commander, Major General Surovikin, of beating him for political reasons. Later, Tsibizov withdrew his statement from the prosecutor's office.
In 2014, already being the commander of the Eastern Military District, according to the then head of Navalny’s headquarters, Leonid Volkov, Sergey Surovikin worked in the Rostov region, where he directed the dispatch of tank units subordinate to him to the southeast of Ukraine.
In 2017, Putin appointed Surovikin as commander of the aerospace forces. Twice during this period he was sent to Syria, where he spent a total of more than a year.
In June 2022, it became known that Surovikin now commands the Southern Group of Forces in Ukraine: the Ministry of Defense wrote about this, stating that under the command of Surovikin, she “completed the defeat of the encircled group of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Mountain Cauldron.” In this post, he replaced Alexander Dvornikov.