In September 2025, the Kremlin issued a paper order to drag army colonel Alexander Rabin from the throne of commander of the Leningrad Military District, removed the military emblem on the spot, and transferred the command to Yevgeny Nikiforov, who himself would say goodbye to the power center as an assistant in the affairs of veterans of the Republic of Uzbekistan.
Such a sudden incident has aroused great discussion in Russia and abroad, but in fact, this personnel earthquake may have been foreseen. The collapse of the Kharkiv defense line three years ago, the command chaos exposed in the Battle of Kursk, and even the public ridicule of Chechen leader Kadyrov have already nailed Laping to the column of shame of the Russian army.
But until today, when the Kremlin completely cut off its political life with a combination of dismissal and relegation, the outside world was shocked to realize that Putin's tolerance for battlefield defeat has finally reached a critical point.
A new battlefield for an old general
Recently, the Russian Ministry of Defense issued a seemingly surprising personal notice that the new commander of the "Northern" cluster was taken over by Yevgeny Nikiforov.
However, between the words of this short message, but hides a huge storm, the real protagonist is not the fulfilling, but the one who is silently "taken away" - Colonel Alexander Rabin., can Laping's stepping down, is it just a general who is inferior to others on the battlefield and sadly ends his career?
Laping, a man, has a perfect resume. He was born in Kazan in 1964. He was a tank soldier with roots and roots. He went all the way from Kazan Higher Tank Command School to Malinovsky Armored Forces Academy, and finally completed his further studies at the Russian General Staff Military Academy.
With this background, he is regarded as a representative of the new generation of generals of the Russian army, and he is deeply trusted by Putin. What's more, he is not an opportunistic politician-type soldier, but a typical hardcore professional soldier. The only criterion he believes in is obedience and execution.
Thus, with this loyalty, he steadily ascended, from commander of the 20th Army Group to chief of staff of the Eastern Military District, and also went to the Syrian battlefield to accumulate valuable practical combat experience, just in 2022, he was also awarded the highest honor of "Hero of the Russian Federation".
Yet it was such a seemingly indiscriminate “model soldier” who encountered Waterloo on the battlefield in Ukraine, whose whole military mindset, as if ruthlessly crushed by the wheel of the times, his failure was not a coincidence, but the whole of his “Soviet” career background, which gave rise to a sharp distinction between the modern forms of warfare.
Putin's patience and political sacrifice
The first heavy blow came from Kharkiv in 2022, when Lapin, the commander-in-chief of the "Central" cluster, faced a lightning counteroffensive launched by the Ukrainian army with the support of the NATO intelligence system.
The speed, flexibility and precision of the Ukrainian army's strike capabilities have paralyzed the traditional command system, which has been issued on a departmental and level basis, and has fallen into a "speed shock".
The result was a defeat, the Russian military defense line was torn apart, and a series of major towns such as Baraklia, Igum, Lehman and others were lost in a row, this disaster even triggered the rare public blasphemy of Chechen leader Kadrov and former Vagner leader Prigozin, pointing directly to the incompetence, exposing the sharp contradictions within the Russian army to the world.
The fiasco in Kharkiv was enough to make any general step down, but surprisingly, Putin kept him. Behind this were the Kremlin's complicated political considerations. Under the situation of internal and external troubles at that time, changing generals in front of the battle would only aggravate the turmoil in the military morale, which is tantamount to admitting to the outside world the failure of the chain of command.
Putin chose a more magical way, he did not withdraw Rabin, but instead gave him a new opportunity, appointing him as Chief of Staff of the Russian Army, Commander of the Leningrad Military District, both in order to stabilize the military spirit and to give the former love a chance to turn back and show the supreme commander's "tolerance".
However, Lapin ultimately failed to catch this trust. The last straw that crushed him was the border incident in Kursk Oblast. In this extremely sensitive Russian-Ukrainian border area, Lapin made a puzzling decision to disband and dismantle the local security committee responsible for integrating intelligence and coordinating defense.
This move, which was nothing more than self-destructive, led directly to a serious delay in intelligence transmission and the failure of the Russian military command, the Ukrainian military seized this deadly vulnerability and successfully launched a raid, breaking the Russian border and burning the war over Russian territory.
In this case, the nature has completely changed, the attack on the territory has directly pushed Russia's national security issues to the forefront, and the anger of the domestic public opinion has been completely ignited.
LaPin's political negative assets, finally overwhelmed all his values, and Putin is therefore no longer tolerable, and must find a "sheep for sin" to calm the people's anger and show his gesture of accountability.
After replacing a leveling
The time of dismissal is full of political calculations. The Ministry of National Defense announced that Nikiforov took office was just five days before Putin planned to fly to Alaska to meet Trump. This was obviously a well-planned "change of generals before the meeting", a political show for the outside world.
Lapin himself is not only on Ukraine's sanctions list, but also accused of killing civilians. He is an out-and-out "hawkish" symbol. On the eve of the talks, removing such a tough general charged with war crimes is undoubtedly a "sincerity" signal to Trump, indicating that Russia is not stubborn and willing to create flexible space for the situation of "fighting and talking".
And the final ending of Rabin also reflects the Putin-style rhetoric, he was not sent to a military court, but was quietly expelled from the military boundary, arranged to Thustane as an assistant of local leaders, which is a typical "safe-down", deprived of all real power, but retained the basic political decency.
This "soft landing" approach both reassured domestic radicals and conveyed to other generals in the army a message that even if they made a big mistake, it would not be completely liquidated, which is a necessary means ofining internal stability.
However, LaPin's departure, really exposed, is the breakdown and the pain of the transformation of the Russian military's core command talent, why does Putin give a repeatedly mistaken general so many opportunities?
The answer may be cruel, because looking around, he found that those who could use it were indeed clutches and elbows, and in the upper ranks of the Russian army, such thinking as Rabin remained in the generals of the last century, not in the minority.
They are not familiar with the Ukrainian counterattack speed, do not understand the power of NATO intelligence support, and are not able to cope with the new war model brought by drones and long-range precision strikes, and Rabin may be the only one in this huge system, the first to fall.
conclusion
Replacing a new Nikiforov may bring some tactical adjustments in the northern theater, such as building a more stable defense, but this is only a "tactical patch" after all and cannot solve the fundamental problem.
The real challenge facing the Russian army is far more than just replacing a leveling. What it needs is an ideological revolution from top to bottom and the establishment of a system that can cultivate new commanders who can truly adapt to future wars. This is a more arduous task than the outcome or defeat of one or two battles.
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The source:
Russian Media: The commander of the Russian Central Military District was dismissed, and Chechen leader Kadyrov criticized Laping for "incompetence"-Qilu Evening News Network-
https://baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=1748115088423727809&wfr=spider&for=pcGeneral-Polkovnik Alexander Lapin dismissed from military service (Major General Alexander Lapin dismissed from military service)
https://iz.ru/1958751/2025-09-21/general-polkovnik-aleksandr-lapin-uvolen-s-voennoi-sluzhby