The interagency council coordinated activities between the army and secret services in the Kursk region, according to The Wall Street Journal’s source. Lapin dissolved it, saying only that the army had sufficient strength and resources to defend the Russian border.
When the Ukrainian offensive in the Kursk region began, the Russian security forces didn’t have a unified command to turn to and acted chaotically and ineffectively as a result. There was also a power struggle between the Interior Ministry, the FSB and the Defence Ministry reminiscent of events in September 2022, when Ukrainian forces launched a lightning counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region. That time, the Russians had failed to sufficiently fortify their front-line positions, the WSJ reported, and Ukraine managed to reclaim thousands of square kilometres of its territory.
A Novaya Europe source in the Russian Defence Ministry believes Lapin would not have taken this decision alone as the council employed FSB, Interior Ministry and Border Guard Service members in addition to servicemen. “Lapin did not have the authority to dissolve the council,” the source said. “He could, of course, have lobbied for it to be shut down, but it wasn’t within his remit to shut it down himself.”
Lapin was born in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan in Russia’s Volga region in 1964. A career soldier, he graduated from the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia in 2009.
He served in Syria in 2017 before being appointed head of the Combined Arms Academy of the Armed Forces of Russia later that year. He led Russian troops in Syria again from 2018 to 2019. At the start of the war with Ukraine, he was appointed commander of the Centre group of military units, a division created specifically for the war effort.