An increasingly desperate Vladimir Putin is feared to be bringing a general who advocated using nuclear weapons in Ukraine back from the cold, according to a new report.
Sergei Surovikin, 59, has been in exile in Africa following the Wagner Group coup attempt led by the mercenary army’s late boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin. The armed mutiny against the Kremlin saw the group’s soldiers march on Moscow in 2023, only to abandon their mission 120 miles from the capital.
Now “General Armageddon” is reportedly back in the fold, brought in by the president, 73, as his war flounders under relentless bombardments in Russia and little progress in Ukraine.
Amid a desperate shortage of generals, driven by a high death toll at home and on the front, Surovikin is feared to have been ordered west to Ukraine.
He’s a polarizing figure, regarded as tough and decisive by hardliners in Russia and as ruthless and brutal by observers in the West.
“Generals like this don’t lie around on the sofa,” said Russian military commentator Colonel Viktor Baranets, according to The Sun. He added that Surovikin is currently back in Moscow.
“Russia and its army need such generals.
“In the Kremlin and the Defence Ministry they are seriously racking their brains over how to fit Surovikin—a tough, decisive and powerful military commander—into the realities currently taking shape on the battlefield.”
In a 2022 profile, pro-Kremlin mass-market tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda said in a translated passage that, “Since Syria, his colleagues have called him ‘General Armageddon.’ He earned this unofficial nickname among his colleagues for his ability to act unconventionally and harshly.”
Human Rights Watch put him on a list of names in 2020 that may have been involved in violations during the 2019 and 2020 Idlib offensive in Syria. Other names on that list included Putin and former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
In late 2022 and early 2023, Surovikin led vast swathes of the Russian offensive in Ukraine, and in a 2022 New York Times report was said to have been heard by U.S. intelligence supporting the use of nukes.
It all came crashing down after Putin seemingly lost trust following a coup attempt led by Prigozhin, which Surovikin had been linked to. The links were never publicly substantiated. Prigozhin later died in an eyebrow-raising plane crash.
Surovikin appeared to step back from high-profile postings, and last year British intelligence said it believed he’d been sent to Algeria.
“Sergey Surovikin, former Commander of the Russian Group of Forces in Ukraine, is reportedly carrying out a role as ‘head of a group of Russian military specialists’ at the Russian Embassy in Algeria,” the Ministry of Defence said in May last year.
“Surovikin, also former commander-in-chief of the Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS), was not seen in public for many months following the abortive Wagner Group mutiny led by Yevgeny Prigozhin in June 2023, which was denounced by Russian President Putin as ‘treason’.
“Reports of Surovikin’s arrest and detention in relation to the June 2023 Wagner Group mutiny were not publicly confirmed. The Russian Ministry of Defence (MOD) did not officially announce Surovikin’s resignation. However, in September 2023, references to him were reportedly removed from the Russian MOD’s website.
“Russian authorities were likely suspicious of Surovikin’s long association with Wagner… Surovikin also served as point of contact for Wagner with the Russian MOD.”
His return to Ukraine comes at a troubling time.
The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said in its latest report in August that civilian deaths are on the rise, saying “at least 372 civilians were killed and 2,349 injured in Ukraine in August 2026.
“The number of civilians killed and injured was the second-highest monthly figure in 2026, after July (448 killed; 2,675 injured).
“In the first eight months of 2026, more civilians were killed and injured in Ukraine than during the whole of 2025. Civilian casualties from January to August 2026 (2,222 killed; 13,058 injured) were 55 percent higher than in the same period in 2025 and more than double than in the same period in 2024.”
It led Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to tell Reuters on Saturday that his country’s intelligence service had seen documents suggesting the Kremlin had adopted a “new doctrine” of hitting roads, schools and other everyday civilian infrastructure.
“We saw documents and we know that they allow them to attack infrastructure, logistics, and especially to attack in the cities, in the villages, everywhere, roads, schools, hospitals,” he told the agency in an interview. “To pressure people to leave the capital, leave different cities: this is the goal of the operation.”
