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With the appointment of General Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s top military officer, as direct operational commander of Ukraine’s troubled war, President Vladimir Putin has redoubled – and now is – his belief that the invasion’s goals can be achieved without a new leadership, analysts said , he turns to a trusted confidante who will carry out his orders without question.
“Gerasimov’s appointment is likely intended to support an intended crucial Russian military effort in 2023,” the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, wrote in an analysis on Wednesday.
“Putin has repeatedly shown that he misunderstands the capabilities of the Russian armed forces and has not abandoned his maximalist war aims in Ukraine,” the analysis reads. “Putin may have appointed Gerasimov, the most senior officer in the Russian military, to succeed a series of theater commanders to oversee a major offensive that Putin believes—probably mistakenly—Russian forces can mount in 2023.”
Other analysts said Gerasimov may be destined to take over the overthrow of further Russian battlefield failures. Still others speculated that Gerasimov and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu were attempting to return control of the irregular forces, led by Wagner mercenary group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin and strong Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, to traditional military leaders.
Gerasimov, 67, an army general and deputy defense minister, has been chief of the general staff for more than a decade and a Kremlin insider who played a key role in planning the war from the start. As head of the joint forces in Ukraine, he replaces General Sergei Surovikin, who in just three months at the helm of the war effort has been credited with stabilizing Russian positions after Ukraine recaptured large tracts of land.
Some pundits said personal rivalries were in the mix. “Shoigu and Gerasimov demoted Surovikin and put Gerasimov in charge of the operation in Ukraine, demoted their most competent supreme commander and replaced him with an incompetent one,” tweeted Dara Massicot, a Russian defense affairs analyst at Rand Corp. “This is a story that has it all: infighting, infighting, jealousy.”
Moscow’s recent abrupt reshuffle of its top commanders, announced by the Defense Ministry on Wednesday but no doubt sanctioned by Putin himself, has veteran Kremlin observers buzzing. In Russia, many war hawks were furious that Gerasimov, whom they blame for the lousy planning that led to repeated battlefield defeats, is now directly in charge as the war enters its 11th month.
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A career officer with nearly 50 years of service, Gerasimov is a conservative and veteran field commander who joined the Soviet Army in 1977 and rose through the ranks in the Panzer Corps. Surovikin, nicknamed “General Armageddon” for his brutal tactics as commander in Syria, has now been essentially demoted to Gerasimov’s second-in-command.
Prigozhin and Kadyrov were supporters of Surovikin but had harshly criticized other Russian military commanders, including Colonel-General Alexander Lapin, who was promoted in Wednesday’s reshuffle. according to Russian media. Lapin had been removed from a senior post in a previous reshuffle when the war stalled.
Mark Galeotti, an analyst and expert on Russian security affairs, said Surovikin’s demotion shows Putin’s tendency to associate people with problems. “He thinks it just takes one new person,” Galeotti said in an interview. “He thinks that was Surovikin’s move and now he’s suffering for it.”
Galeotti said Gerasimov’s appointment brings “additional political clout” to day-to-day operational decisions, but also signals an attempt to heal growing divisions in the Russian military. The Defense Ministry’s statement on Wednesday indicated that the reorganization involved an “expansion” of the operation and was aimed at “improving the quality … and effectiveness of the management of the Russian Armed Forces.”
“There has to be some hope that he can actually make the coordination with the Rosgwardia” – Russia’s National Guard – “work better with Kadyrov’s forces and especially with Wagner, because that was a disastrous failure,” Galeotti said.
The leadership changes, whatever their true purpose, underscore that Putin never expected to find himself in such a catastrophic situation. He is now almost a year into an invasion that some Russian commentators predicted would end successfully within days if victorious Russian troops passed through Kyiv.
Instead, tens of thousands were killed and wounded, and Putin was forced to announce an unpopular mobilization to recruit reinforcements. Four Ukrainian regions that Russia allegedly annexed in violation of international law are not fully under Moscow’s control. And Ukraine’s western backers are planning shipments of additional and more powerful weapons to Kyiv.
Many pro-Russian military bloggers have expressed skepticism that the reorganization would solve the Russian army’s growing problems, including its reliance on hastily trained, poorly equipped recruits. “The sum does not change by changing the places of its parts,” wrote a pro-war analyst aligning himself with Rybar’s handle on Telegram.
Others say that Gerasimov – burdened with direct responsibility as Russia heads for more defeats – will be used as a potential scapegoat for Putin when the moment is right.
Although Surovikin largely avoided public criticism, he was responsible when Russia suffered several humiliating defeats on the battlefield, including its withdrawal from the city of Kherson, which Surovikin had predicted might be necessary when he was promoted to end the war monitor.
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Recently, Russia has suffered heavy casualties in a series of precision strikes by Ukraine, including a devastating attack in Makiivka that killed at least 89 Russian soldiers. Some commentators blamed the inability of Russian commanders to house soldiers and store ammunition in the same building.
Gerasimov was appointed chief of Russia’s general staff by Putin in 2012 and has been closely associated with Russia’s use of hybrid warfare, including its 2014 invasion and illegal annexation of Crimea.
The reshuffle has revealed growing fault lines within the command, with analysts saying Surovikin’s demotion was a sharp snub from Kadyrov and Prigozhin, whose Wagnerian forces led a month-long push to take the eastern Ukrainian town of Bakhmut.
Prigozhin on Wednesday claimed to have taken a decisive step closer to capturing the neighboring town of Soledar. But Ukrainian officials denied the claim, and fierce fighting continued in and around Soledar on Thursday. Western officials have said the battle has little strategic value but that Prigozhin wants a public relations victory.
“This maneuver is a tug-of-war between Surovikin (and his sympathizers like Prigozhin) and Gerasimov,” Russian political scientist Tatiana Stanovaya wrote on Telegram. “Putin vacillates between them as an unprofessional soldier who doesn’t understand how to save the whole thing. Gerasimov could also be deposed in a few months.”
Molly McKew, a Washington-based information warfare expert, said the new appointments were intended to restore the balance of power.
“Putin loves to cut the legs off whoever is tallest and I think that’s part of it,” McKew said in an interview. “It’s a signal that these internal power struggles that everyone has been microanalyzing and that we focus so much on are under control.”
Despite all the internal machinations, one thing remains clear: the war is not going according to plan. McKew said the reshuffle reflected preparation for new offensives. “I think it signals an escalation, a commitment to moving forward and maintaining the war that no one on the Russian side was so sure of because they planned to win so quickly,” McKew said.
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