A Russian court sentenced a former military commander who had accused his superiors of incompetence to five years in prison on a corruption charge on Thursday. His supporters denounced the punishment as politically motivated.
The commander, Maj. Gen. Ivan Popov, was dismissed from the Russian Army in July 2023, the most widely known casualty of a purge after the failed mutiny of the paramilitary leader Yevgeny V. Prigozhin. Earlier that year, General Popov had helped repulse a major Ukrainian offensive in the Zaporizhzhia region.
After his dismissal, General Popov addressed his troops in a four-minute recording in which he said he had been removed from his post for speaking truth to his superiors about battlefield problems.
“We were hit in the rear by our senior commander, who treacherously and vilely decapitated our army at the most difficult and tense moment,” General Popov said in the audio — an apparent reference to Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, the chief of Russia’s armed forces.
The audio was made public by Andrei Gurulyov, a former general and a senior lawmaker in Russia’s governing party, underlining General Popov’s high reputation among the country’s traditional military elite and pro-war ultranationalist commentators. General Popov’s allies have presented him as an unassuming and effective battlefield commander who was more concerned with the welfare of his troops than the backdoor politics of military headquarters.
After the audio was made public, General Popov was arrested and charged with siphoning off metal matériel intended for the army. It was a type of crime that Mr. Prigozhin, General Popov’s former ally, had routinely accused General Gerasimov and his circle of in frequent expletive-laden audio and video messages.
On Thursday, a Russian military court stripped General Popov of his rank during a closed session and fined him more than $9,000, as well as sentenced him to five years in a low-security penal colony, according to the Russian state news media.
The general’s lawyers said that they would appeal the sentence, the state news agencies added.
Some of General Popov’s influential supporters denounced the ruling, a rare outburst of dissent among Russia’s pro-war ultranationalist commentators, who have significantly toned down their messaging since Mr. Prigozhin’s mutiny and subsequent death in a plane crash.
“Russia will always remember Ivan Ivanovich Popov as a victor who deflected Ukrainian Armed Forces’s most powerful blow of this war,” Yuri Podoliaka, a military blogger, wrote to his three million followers on the Telegram messaging app. He added: “This could not happen in a state with the rule of law.”