After several setbacks on the ground, the Russian Defense Ministry has announced the appointment of a new commander for its “military special operation” in Ukraine.
The Russian military on Saturday announced the appointment of a new commander for its “military special operation” in Ukraine, after a series of bitter backlashes on the ground and signs of growing dissatisfaction among elites over the way the conflict was being run.
“Army General Sergei Surovikin has been appointed commander of the combined force group in the field of military special operations in Ukraine,” the Russian Defense Ministry said in a telegram.
The name of the predecessor was never announced
Sergei Surovikin, 55, is a veteran of the civil war in Tajikistan in the 1990s, the second Chechen war in the 2000s, and the Russian intervention in Syria that began in 2015. Until then he led the group of forces “South” in Ukraine. according to a July report by the Russian Ministry.
The name of his predecessor was never officially announced, but according to Russian media it was General Alexander Dvornikov, also a veteran of the second Chechen war and commander of Russian forces in Syria from 2015 to 2016.
Bitter defeats in Ukraine
This decision, unusually published by Moscow, follows a series of crushing defeats suffered by the Russian army in Ukraine.
Moscow’s forces were driven out of much of the northeastern Kharkiv region in early September by a Ukrainian counter-offensive that allowed Kyiv to retake thousands of square kilometers of territory.
Russian troops also lost 500 square kilometers of territory in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine, narrowly escaping encirclement at Lyman, a logistics hub now in Kyiv hands.
These setbacks have drawn criticism from within the Russian elite, with Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov notably chastising the military command, while a senior parliament official, Andrei Kartapolov, publicly called on the army to stop “lying” about its defeats.
This announcement comes on the day of an explosion that partially destroyed the Crimean Bridge, a key supply infrastructure for this peninsula annexed by Moscow and Russian forces in Ukraine and dear to Vladimir Putin.