On Monday, several media outlets reported that Colonel General Alexander Lapin, who previously headed the Leningrad Military District, had been dismissed from the Russian army. Among them was Tatar-Inform.
According to the outlet, Lapin plans to become an aide to Tatarstan head Rustam Minnikhanov. The publication noted that the general has close ties to the republic: he was born in Kazan in 1964.
He is expected to oversee areas related to contract military recruitment, support for war participants and their families, social and medical rehabilitation for veterans, and the reintegration of returning fighters into civilian life at the Kazan Kremlin.
As Novaya Gazeta Europe previously wrote, Lapin was born on January 1, 1964, in Kazan. In 1988 he graduated from the Kazan Higher Tank Command School, in 1997 from the Malinovsky Military Armored Forces Academy in Moscow, and in 2009 from the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces.
From 2009, Lapin served as deputy commander of the 58th Army. In April 2012, he was appointed commander of the 20th Guards Combined Arms Army of the Western Military District. In 2017, he served as chief of staff of the troop grouping in Syria, and in September 2017 he was appointed head of the Combined Arms Academy of the Russian Armed Forces. He later led the Central Military District and, in 2018–2019, commanded Russia’s troop grouping in Syria.
“I first paid attention to Colonel General Alexander Lapin in the spring of 2022, when he awarded the Zhukov Medal to his son, Lieutenant Colonel Denis Alexandrovich Lapin, who had commanded the failed offensive on the Ukrainian cities of Sumy and Chernihiv,” military analyst Ilya Barabanov of the BBC Russian Service told Novaya Gazeta Europe.
Barabanov said that on the day the Zvezda TV channel aired a report about that award, the Russian army was retreating from the Chernihiv and Kyiv directions. He also recalled that on July 4, 2022, it became known that Vladimir Putin had decided to award Lapin the title of Hero of Russia for the assault on Lysychansk.