VGTRK employee Alexander Sladkov, the author of the Sladkov Z-channel, wrote a biography of Sergei Surovikin, commander of Russian troops in Ukraine. He wrote that his supposedly heroic father "appears to have shot down three American planes and died in the Far East while steering his crashing plane away from residential areas." In fact, hero pilot Vladimir Surovikin, who died in 1966 in the Far East, has nothing to do with General Surovikin. The great-grandson of the pilot, Vladimir Mazich, told the journalists of Polygon.Media and the We Can Explain Telegram channel about this.
Hero-pilot Vladimir Surovikin really took the plane away from residential buildings, but did not have time to eject. In honor of him, a commemorative plaque was erected in Ussuriysk. However, his great-grandson said that Vladimir Surovikin had no sons, but only a daughter. “The problem is that we [in the family] do not know who Sergei Surovikin is. Perhaps something was messed up in the Far East. We have hope that this is a mistake,” Mazich said.
Mazich himself opposes the war in Ukraine. “I wanted to write that I respect Ukrainians for their fortitude, but this fact has already become clear to everyone in recent days, and this will not change,” he wrote on February 27.
In 1995, Sergei 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 was in command of the Southern Group of Forces in Ukraine. The Ministry of Defense then reported that under the leadership of Surovikin, the troops completed "the defeat of the encircled grouping of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the" Mountain boiler "". In October, Sergei Surovikin replaced Alexander Dvornikov as commander of the joint grouping of Russian troops in Ukraine.