Sergei Surovikin, center, then commander of the Russian Aerospace Forces, during a meeting in Sochi, Russia November 3, 2021. MIKHAIL METZEL/TASS/SIPA USA
Three names, Dmitri Komar, Ilya Krichevsky and Vladimir Oussov, remain linked in Russian memory to that of Sergei Vladimirovich Surovikin when he commanded a motorized rifle battalion in 1991. On the night of August 20-21 of the same year, when Moscow was rebelling against a coup by a group of communist caciques, the 24-year-old officer at the head of a column of armored vehicles defeated the roadblocks set up by demonstrators on the Garden Ring, the ring road the Russian capital. The three victims, one crushed by a tank and the other two shot down, were posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. The little captain spent almost six months in prison before being released.
Thirty-one years later, Sergei Surovikin has lost nothing of his brutal reputation. Just promoted to commander of Russian forces in Ukraine on Oct. 8, the Novosibirsk native implemented a policy of terror in western Siberia from Oct. 10, firing a rain of missiles across Ukrainian territory. “It’s useless from a purely military point of view, but the operation sends the message ‘The front is now all Ukraine’,” notes Jean-Christophe Noël, associate researcher at the Center for Security Studies at the French Institute for International Relations (IFRI). Surovikin has no qualms. »
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Hailed by die-hard pro-war advocates — ultranationalist billionaire Konstantin Malofeev went so far as to ask the Russian Defense Ministry to give him full powers on the ground — the appointment of General Surovikin, 55, would have been decided after Vladimir Putin’s ouster by Lyman, a strategic one City in Donetsk region captured by Ukrainian forces on October 1.
Unusually, when none of his predecessors in charge of overseeing operations in Ukraine had been officially appointed, Russian television almost made him a star by showing the images of the soldier in the situation, the hairless and stern face, the massive Silhouette in his uniform, especially multiplied in Syria.
A reputation as a cruel and loyal man in the Kremlin
Sergei Surovikin served first in Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic, then in the turmoil of a civil war in the 1990s, and then during the second Chechen war in the following decade. He rose through the ranks, becoming Chief of Staff in the Central Military District, helping found the Military Police in 2012 before taking on the post of Commander of the Eastern District, not without earning a reputation over time as a cruel man. In fact, in addition to the arms trafficking charges early in his career, from which he will be acquitted after his conviction is quashed, there are more charges of harassment which, in one case, will result in the suicide of one of his subordinates.
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