Army General Sergei Surovikin replaces Alexander Dvornikov, whose appointment had never been made official.
The Russian army announced on Saturday the appointment of a new commander of its “special military operationin Ukraine after a series of setbacks on the pitch and signs of growing discontent among elites over the conduct of the conflict. “General of the Army Sergei Surovikin was appointed commander of the combined group of troops in the area of the special military operationin Ukraine, the Russian Defense Ministry announced on Telegram.
Serguei Surovikin, 55, is a veteran of the civil war in Tajikistan in the 1990s, the second Chechnya war in the 2000s and the Russian intervention in Syria launched in 2015. Until then, he led the group of forces “Southin Ukraine, according to a Russian ministry report from July. The name of his predecessor was never officially revealed, but according to Russian media it was the General Alexander Dvornikovalso a veteran of the second Chechen war and commander of Russian forces in Syria from 2015 to 2016.
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This decision, which was, unusually, made public by Moscow, comes after a series of crushing defeats suffered by the Russian army in Ukraine. Moscow’s forces were driven out in early September from most of the Kharkiv regionin the northeast, thanks to a Ukrainian counter-offensive which enabled kyiv to retake thousands of square kilometers of territory.
Russian troops also lost 500 square kilometers of territory in Kherson region, in southern Ukraine, and narrowly escaped encirclement at Lyman, a logistics node now in the hands of kyiv. These setbacks provoked criticism within the Russian elite, the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov castigating in particular the military command, while a senior parliamentary official, Andrei Kartapolovpublicly called on the military to “stop lyingon his defeats.
This announcement comes on the day of an explosion that partially destroyed Crimean Bridgea key infrastructure for supplying this peninsula annexed by Moscow and Russian forces in Ukraine, and dear to Vladimir Putin.