A senior Russian general, once favored by the Kremlin but unpopular with troops for his brutal frontal assaults, has been dismissed after four years in top command roles in Ukraine.
Lt. Gen. Sukhrab Akhmedov, 51, a Dagestan native born into a military family, was first reported to have been removed from command and service in Ukraine on Tuesday by the Russian mil-blogger channel Dva Mayora, an information platform closely linked to the Kremlin.
Russia’s independent Astra news agency and Ukrainian mainstream news reported the decision on Wednesday. However, there has been no official statement from the Russian army on Akhmedov’s status.
Akhmedov was a fast-rising Russian officer whose career began in the mid-1990s, largely within elite Naval Infantry “Russian Marine” units. Unlike many senior Russian generals in the Ukraine war, he had no combat experience in Ukraine before 2022 and had never served in Syria.
Akhmedov’s key army experience prior to the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was command of Russia’s elite and Kremlin-favored 155th Marine Infantry Brigade based in Vladivostok, from 2009 through 2014-15, and completion of coursework in 2005 at Moscow’s Frunze Academy, the Russian army’s primary educational institution for grooming selected officers for top command positions.
In late February 2022, as the commander of a picked combined marine assault group, including his old unit, the 155th Brigade, Akhmedov participated in the Kremlin’s main effort aiming to invoke regime change in Ukraine in a few days by overrunning the capital Kyiv and killing or capturing members of the Ukrainian national government.
The first reports that Akhmedov was a commander focused on getting results for his superiors and not being overly concerned with his own troop’s casualty counts date back to March 2022, when the 155th Brigade and other units were repeatedly ordered into failed attacks against tough Ukrainian defenses around the village of Moshchun north of Kyiv.
In April 2022, the Akhmedov-commanded marine assault group, along with much of the Russian forces in Ukraine from the Kyiv sector, was redirected into a general offensive in the eastern Donetsk region. In November, marines from the 155th Brigade, in an open letter addressed to the governor of Sakhalin Island, accused their former brigade commander Akhmedov of wasting marine lives in tactically-ignorant, fruitless attacks.
“As a result of this ‘carefully’ planned offensive by ‘big boss commanders,’ we have lost about 300 men killed, wounded, and missing in four days. Fifty percent of our equipment. That’s just our brigade. The district command, along with Akhmedov, is concealing this and using the official (falsified) loss figures for fear of responsibility,” the letter says.
“How long will incompetents… continue to plan military operations for the sake of their reports and awards at the cost of the lives of so many people? They don’t care about anything, they just want to show off. For them, soldiers are nothing but meat,” it adds.
Rare public complaints like that notwithstanding, Akhmedov was promoted to command of Russia’s 20th Combined Arms Army in December 2022.
In early 2023, ordered to lead a major offensive spearheaded by the 20th Army with the objective of capturing the city of Vuhledar in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, Akhmedov launched weeks of armored assaults into the teeth of strong defenses held by veteran Ukrainian air assault and mechanized infantry units.
Ukrainian mine fields, artillery fire, guided missile ambushes and dug-in tanks stopped the assaults cold for months.
During fighting on Feb. 9-10, Akhmetov’s forces assaulted Vuhledar’s defensive lines, with the already battered 155th Naval Infantry Brigade suffering an estimated 300 killed or seriously wounded in under 24 hours. Satellite imagery later confirmed the destruction of at least 31 tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and armored personnel carriers.
The elite Russian marines were repelled, according to statements from the defending unit, Ukraine’s 72nd Mechanized Brigade.
Ukrainian losses reportedly were negligible. Former British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace later said the Vladivostok marine brigade was “annihilated.”
Akhmedov was personally promoted to the rank of Major General by former Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on Feb. 17, 2023.
Akhmedov came under sharp criticism even from pro-Moscow military bloggers in June 2023, after a formation he had ordered to assemble for his motivational speech near the Ukrainian city of Kreminna was struck by Ukrainian missiles.
Popular Russian mil-blogger Kirill Federov (550,000 Telegram followers) said the unit stood in the open, in formation, for more than two hours, waiting for Akhmedov and his entourage to arrive, who were late.
Ukrainian reconnaissance spotted the parade formation and hit it with artillery rockets loaded with cluster munitions. Both Ukrainian and independent Russian media reported subunits of Russia’s 144th Motorized Rifle Division suffered around 200 casualties in the strikes, of whom roughly half were killed.
Akhmedov resigned his command of the 20th Army in May 2024 to be reassigned. Sometime between October and November in 2024, he oversaw Russian ground and air forces defending against an unexpected Ukrainian invasion of Russia’s Kursk region.
By April 2025, Akhmedov-led troops had reduced the roughly 1,300-square-kilometer [502-square-mile] enclave carved out by Ukrainian troops in Russian territory (roughly the size of Britain’s Surrey county or Germany’s Saarland region) to a belt of fortifications along the Russo-Ukraine border.
Untried North Korean commando forces leading Akhmedov’s counterattacks took crippling losses attacking over open, snowy fields covered by Ukrainian drone swarms. A North Korean captured by the Ukrainians, in a video made public by Ukraine’s military intelligence agency (HUR), said that his unit was effectively wiped out by Ukrainian first-person view (FPV) drones hunting down individual soldiers.
On July 10, 2025, the head of Russia’s Dagestan Republic, Sergei Melikov, announced via government media that Akhmedov had been awarded Russia’s highest Hero of Russia medal for outstanding military achievements and for being “a combat commander who never hides behind others and always stands with his men.”
The official Russian news wire service TASS said Akhmedov had received the award for “courage shown in the zone of the special military operation [the Kremlin’s official term for the Ukraine invasion], including in the Kursk sector.”
In the summer of 2025, Akhmedov was moved from army-level combat command to a senior but more distant post as deputy commander of Russia’s naval forces in the Far East. That comparatively restful assignment was cut short in October 2025, when he was sent back to eastern Ukraine to lead a struggling Russian offensive in the Pokrovsk sector.
The initially successful August assaults relied on new tactics, with hundreds of Russian infantry advancing on foot in massed infiltrations to slip deep behind Ukrainian lines, exploiting poor weather that grounded Ukrainian drones and stretched Ukrainian forces thin.
The operation cut a narrow salient into some 15 kilometers (9 miles) deep and 5 kilometers (3 miles) wide near the village of Dobropillia, and threatened the major Ukrainian logistical hub of Pokrovsk.
However, local Russian commanders found that once the weather cleared, they were unable to move reinforcements into the salient because supply vehicles were swarmed by Ukrainian drones and pounded by Ukrainian artillery.
Russian and Ukrainian battlefield tracking platforms place Akhmedov’s arrival and assumption of command in the Dobropilia sector in mid-October, after failed resupply efforts had left Russian infantry short of food and ammunition and effectively without combat support for over a month.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces under the overall command of the combat-tested 1st National Guards Corps “Azov” concentrated urban-warfare-trained assault units in the area to encircle Russian infantry detachments and eliminate them.
According to Ukrainian reports, Russian commanders under Akhmedov failed to stop the steady Ukrainian counteroffensive and, in the later stages, reverted to obsolete massed armored assaults across open terrain. In late October, President Volodymyr Zelensky told Ukrainian media that Russia had lost around 12,000 troops in fighting near Dobropillia and Pokrovsk, with an estimated 7,500 killed or seriously wounded.
On Dec. 22, a last-ditch, Akhmedov-ordered massed armored assault to retake ground around Dobropillia “at any cost” collapsed spectacularly. Ukrainian army reports said 24 armored vehicles from the 155th Brigade and other marine units were sent forward, but bomber drones, FPV drones, mortars, mines, and artillery shredded the attack – destroying 15 tanks and other armored vehicles in under two hours and forcing the rest to retreat.
Official Kyiv outlets declared the Dobropillia salient eliminated on Nov. 29, though small groups of Russian troops appeared to remain at large for another two weeks. In post-battle reports released on Dec. 11, the 1st Corps’s media and outreach unit said around 100 mostly exhausted Russian soldiers surrendered, including more than 50 near the village of Kucheriv. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) confirmed Russian casualties and dozens of surrenders but said Kyiv’s precise figures could not be independently verified.
According to open-source intelligence (OSINT), Akhmedov is married to Margarita Vladimirovna Akhmedova, and the couple has three children – two daughters and a son.