Russian Army Commander Dismissed After Reporting on Deteriorating Situation

A Russian commander announced that he was dismissed from his position after reporting on the dire state of the Russian army in the battle against Ukraine. The Russian commander stated that Russian soldiers are suffering due to the failures of senior military commanders. According to Reuters, Ivan Popov, a commander in the Russian army, said, "There was a difficult situation with senior leaders where one had to either remain silent and be cowardly or state the situation as it is." He added, "I had no right to lie in the name of my fallen comrades, so I reported all the problems." This Russian army commander indicated that he raised the issue of Russian soldiers' deaths due to Ukrainian artillery and stated that the army lacks enemy identification systems. Ivan Popov said that the Russian army has "failed" in employing counter-battery artillery to respond to heavy Ukrainian artillery fire in the Zaporizhzhia region. He continued, stating that hundreds of Ukrainian artillery shells hit Russian positions in Zaporizhzhia, "but there was no counter-battery radar system." He mentioned that people are dying due to shortages of Russian military equipment. Popov added, "Senior leaders apparently felt some kind of threat from me and quickly received orders from the Minister of Defense to get rid of me within a day." He stated, "The Ukrainian army could not break our ranks at the front, but our senior commander struck us from behind, right at the hardest and most intense moment." Ivan Popov, commander of the 58th Combined Arms Army of Russia, announced his dismissal in a voice message published by Andrei Gurulyov, a Russian lawmaker. Russia, which launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, calling it a "special military operation" to disarm its neighbor, has killed thousands, displaced millions, and turned many cities in eastern and southern Ukraine into heaps of rubble. Kyiv and its allies, however, refer to this war, now in its seventeenth month, as an aggressive land grab. Concurrently with the NATO summit, Russia attacked Ukraine for the second consecutive night. The G7 group announces a framework statement for international support for Ukraine. Russia: The war in Ukraine will continue as long as the West does not abandon its plan to defeat Moscow.