The Russian military announced on Saturday that it has appointed a new commander for its “special military operation” in Ukraine, after a series of defeats on the ground and growing discontent among the Russian elite.
“Army General Sergei Surovikin has been appointed commander of the combined troop grouping in the special military operations zone in Ukraine,” the Russian Defense Minister said in Telegram.
Surovikin, 55, is a veteran of the civil war in Tajikistan in the 1990s, the second Chechen war (2000s), and the Russian intervention in Syria launched in 2015.
So far it has led the grouping of “Southern” forces in Ukraine, according to a report released by the Russian ministry in July.
The name of his predecessor was never officially disclosed, but according to Russian media, this is General Alexander Dnornikov, another veteran of the Second Chechen War and the commander of Russian forces in Syria from 2015 to 2016.
The decision came after a series of defeats in Ukraine.
Moscow forces were expelled from most of the Kharkiv region in early September as part of a Ukrainian counteroffensive that allowed Kiev to reclaim thousands of square kilometers.
Russian troops also lost 500 square kilometers in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine and narrowly escaped the siege of Port, a major logistics center now controlled by the Ukrainians.
a series of setbacks that caused the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov to criticize the military command above all; and a senior parliamentary official, Andrei Kartapolov, publicly urged the military to “stop lying” about their defeat.
The announcement came on the same day that an explosion partially destroyed the Crimean bridge, which was key to supplying the peninsula that Moscow and Russian forces had annexed in Ukraine.
source: Noticias
