The commander of the Russian Airborne Forces, Colonel-General Mykhailo Teplinsky, has been appointed the new commander of the Dnipro military group on the Ukrainian front, the Russian news agency TASS reported on Monday with reference to Reuters and Agerpres. Teplinsky replaced Colonel-General Oleh Makarevich, a separate report from the newspaper “Izvestia”.

Russian troops are divided into several groups. The popular Russian military blogger “Operation Z” claims that the Dnipro group was deployed in the south of Ukraine, where in the Kherson region, Ukrainian units crossed the Dnipro, trying to create bridgeheads on the eastern bank of the river. However, Russia claims that it managed to prevent these attempts.

In June 2022, Teplinsky was appointed to command the elite Russian Airborne Forces, which suffered heavy losses in the first days of the attack on Ukraine. British intelligence says he was removed from any command post on the Ukrainian front in January, but later reinstated, and appears to be one of the few senior generals “highly respected in the lower ranks” of the Russian army.

In April, General Teplinsky appeared on a video recording of a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Some Russian sources suggested that Teplinsky’s position was in jeopardy after the failed uprising by Wagner’s mercenary group in June.

On August 2, speaking to servicemen and veterans of the Airborne Forces of the Russian Federation, he reported that at least 8,500 Russian paratroopers have been wounded in Ukraine. A video of this performance was published online by the Russian military channel Zvezda and deleted after a few hours.

Born on January 9, 1969 in the war-torn Donetsk region, General Teplinsky served in the Russian army in Transnistria. He participated in two wars in Chechnya and took part in military operations in Syria in support of President Bashar al-Assad.