The aggressor-controlled “media” quite lively discussing the detention on May 17 and the subsequent arrest in Moscow by the 235th Garrison military court of the former commander of the 58th Army to the aggressor, major-general Ivan Popov, suspected of “fraud on an especially large scale”, while the case is not being investigated civilian punishers, as according to other removed bonzes of the aggressor army, but by military structures of the Russia’s Investigative committee.
At the same time, the criminal aggressor’s “military correspondents” began en masse to “justify” Popov and demand his release. Judging by this “exchange of opinions,” Popov was detained for dissolving one hundred million on “defensive fortifications,” namely, he “accused of the theft and sale of metal structures intended for the construction of fortifications of the 58th army”; let us recall that Popov previously commanded this invaders’ army, which operated in the summer of 2023 in the Tokmak area.
On July 11 last year, it was reported that Popov was allegedly removed from command of the army for demanding the rotation of the units entrusted to him in a report to the chief of the Russian General staff Valery Gerasimov, in response to which Gerasimov “accused Popov of alarmism and blackmail”.
On July 12, Russia’s State duma deputy Andrei Gurulev, who in the past also commanded the 58th army, published an appeal in the voice of Popov “for colleagues”. In his address, Popov stated that he allegedly “identified all the problematic issues that exist today in the army”, however, it is unclear whether this “truth search” was in fact or it was invented “retroactively” by Popov, who was “lost” for almost a year, probably in the Syrian aggressor’s group.
Let us note that Popov made his career in the Caucasus and he participated in the aggression against Georgia in 2008, and after the start of the occupation of the peninsula, by May 2018 he became the chief of staff of the “onland” 22nd Army corps of the Black Sea Fleet based in the Crimea and at the same time he was the head of the aggressor’s Simferopol military garrison, where, among other things, he “hosted the military parade on May 9, 2019”.
In June 2022, Popov, who had previously been transferred to Kaliningrad, “surfaced” as the commander of Russian troops in the Balakleya area, and then, on an unspecified date, he replaced the previous commander of the 58th army, Mikhail Zusko, whose current “fate,” as they write in the Russian-controlled “media”, supposedly “is a mystery”.
At the head of the 58th army in 2023, Popov was replaced by lieutenant- general Denis Lyamin, who, before the start of the large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, commanded the same 22nd Army corps, replacing Popov there.
It can be assumed that the current arrest of Popov indicates an attempt by certain groups in the leadership of the aggressor’s General staff to present to the Kremlin pre-prepared “guilty persons” and to sacrifice them during the announced “purges”; tt is obvious that the “Popov case” is closely connected with the possible, or, conversely, postponed until “better times,” “Gerasimov case”.
