The arrival of the country’s most important soldier at the vanguard of the offensive transforms the invasion from a military operation into a war that affects all of Russian society.
A much deeper and more significant change than it seems. On Wednesday, Russia’s defense minister announced that he had appointed General Valery Guerassimov as the new supreme commander of its Ukrainian offensive, replacing Sergei Surovikin, who was in the same position for just three short months.
If this generals’ waltz can be read as a sanction against Surovikin for the successive military failures on the ground in recent weeks, including the loss of Kherson, Sergei Jirnov, a former KGB intelligence officer, goes further in the analysis.
Invited to BFMTV on Thursday, he believes that “what happened yesterday is, in my opinion, as crucial as February 24, 2022” and the start of the Russian invasion.
scale change
According to him, Vladimir Putin’s election of this man, who is the country’s highest-ranking soldier, is “a major change in the character of the war”.
“So far it’s been a special operation for the Russians, which means we’ve taken a small contingent, we’ve put a couple of generals at the head of that contingent and we’re trying to cobble together a small war,” he says.
However, the presence of Guerassimov makes “total change scale” with the conflict. “He’s the number one soldier in the country, giving orders to all the other soldiers. Above him is only the defense minister, who is a politician even if he wears the ‘uniform’, and Putin.”
Furthermore, the same Sergei Jirnov also casts the shadow of a tougher war in Ukraine, bringing nuclear risk back into the equation. “Guerassimov is the one who, among the three characters of the Russian state, has the nuclear briefcase, the nuclear codes, which means he doesn’t have to go through anyone anymore.”
However, the use of nuclear weapons should be restricted. In the military doctrine that bears his name, Guerasimov places these types of weapons within the framework of hybrid warfare defined therein.
different paradigm
This theory of scale change is confirmed by Alexandre Melnik, former diplomat in Moscow, who was also invited to our antenna this Thursday.
“There is a paradigm shift,” he confirms.
“We are moving away from the lexical field of the distant military operation that does not affect the whole country, and we are moving towards a real war that affects Russian society as a whole. This is Putin’s final cartridge to give that patriotic panache. involving the whole nation is the way out for Putin,” he concludes.