LONDON (Reuters) – Russia has sacked the commander of its Eastern Military District, Colonel-General Alexander Chaiko, the Russian news site RBC reported on Friday – the latest reshuffle of top brass amid a string of battlefield reversals in Ukraine.
RBC cited publicly available state registers to report that Lieutenant-General Rustam Muradov had been appointed to head the Eastern Military District, which covers troops based in Russia’s Far East, though much of its strength is currently deployed in Ukraine.
Muradov, who was sanctioned by the European Union in February, previously served in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and commanded Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh, a breakaway region of Azerbaijan inhabited mostly by ethnic Armenians.
Though the head of Muradov’s native Dagestan region congratulated him on his appointment, neither the Kremlin nor the defence ministry immediately confirmed the move.
On Monday, RBC reported that the commander of the Western military district, Colonel-General Alexander Zhuravlyov, had been replaced, shortly after dramatic Russian losses in northeast Ukraine last month and Ukraine’s recapture of the strategic hub of Lyman, in Donetsk region.
Since then, Russian forces have has also lost control of several hundred square kilometres of Ukraine’s Kherson region – territory that Moscow now considers part of Russia.
In September, the deputy defence minister in charge of logistics, General Dmitry Bulgakov, was replaced by Colonel General Mikhail Mizintsev, accused by the European Union of orchestrating a siege of the Ukrainian port of Mariupol early in the war that killed thousands of civilians.
In August, the state-owned RIA news agency reported that the commander of the Black Sea fleet had been fired after a series of humiliations including the sinking of its lead warship and the loss of eight warplanes in an attack on a Russian base in Crimea.
(Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Kevin Liffey)
