A few hours after the bridge connecting the Crimean peninsula to the Russian mainland was destroyed, the government of Vladimir Putin decided to change the command of the forces involved in the invasion of Ukraine.
According to the American newspaper The New York Times, General Sergei Surovikin of the Russian Air Force will take command of the Russian forces in Ukraine. The move was announced by Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu via a post on the Russian messaging app Telegram.
Shoigu, “Army General Sergei Surovikin was appointed commander of the troop group in the zone of special military operations in Ukraine.”
Until then, the Putin administration had not made public the name of the commander of the special military operation, which Russia is calling the invasion of Ukraine. However, according to Reuters, British intelligence had determined that the position was held by General Alexander Dvornikov until yesterday.
The change of command comes at a fragile time for Russian troops in Ukraine, with repeated setbacks at the front and growing internal pressure against the war.
Who is the new Russian commander? 55-year-old Surovikin has been leading Russia’s Air and Space Force since 2017. According to the ministry’s website, he commanded a guard unit stationed in Chechnya during Moscow’s war against Islamist rebels in 2004 and received a medal for his service in Syria in 2017.
Image: Description / Ministry of Defense of Russia
He also fought in the Tajikistani civil war in the 1990s and the second Chechen war in the 2000s, according to the NYT.
Before his promotion, he surrounded the southern flank of Russian troops on Ukrainian territory.
Russia is under pressure. In recent weeks, a Ukrainian counteroffensive has recaptured thousands of kilometers of territory once held by Russian troops.
The defeats ordered Putin to call for 300,000 reservists to act in the war effort. The move led to a wave of protests in Russian cities and a mass flight of military-aged men across borders with neighboring countries such as Finland and Kazakhstan.
Earlier this week, Putin dismissed the commanders of two of Russia’s five military districts due to casualties.
More radical wings in Russian politics are increasing pressure on the country to use tactical nuclear weapons in the conflict with Ukraine. These types of weapons have a lower destructive power and are designed to destroy specific targets such as military bases, armored vehicles or naval fleets.
Warheads with the greatest destructive power, such as those used by the United States in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are called strategic nuclear weapons. This type of atomic bomb can destroy entire cities.
Who blew up the bridge? The bridge, hit by Saturday’s blasts, connects Russian territory with the Crimean peninsula, which belongs to Ukraine but was annexed by Putin in 2014. The bridge, which was inaugurated in 2018 to consolidate Russia’s dominance over the region.
Officially, the Ukrainian government did not take responsibility for the attack, but some officials in the country celebrated the explosion of the bridge on social media, among them Andriy Yermak, the chief of staff of President Volodymyr Zelensky, and Emine Dzheppar, the country’s deputy foreign minister.
Mykhailo Podolyak, Advisor to the Chief of Staff, tweeted an image of the destroyed bridge: “Everything illegal must be destroyed, everything stolen must be returned to Ukraine, everything occupied by Russia must be deported.” However, he later published another message suggesting that the Russians were behind the incident.
Ukraine’s postal service announced on Twitter and on its official website that it has issued a stamp commemorating the explosion. The stamp shows the characters Jack and Rose, the protagonists of the movie Titanic, in front of the burning bridge.
How important is the bridge? Built for $3.6 billion in 2018, the bridge is a symbol of the annexation of the Crimean peninsula by the Russian government.
After the start of the war in February, work became the main supply route for Russian forces fighting to protect captured territory in southern Ukraine.
Crimea is landlocked with Kherson, one of four Ukrainian provinces that Russia annexed in September after holding internationally unrecognized referendums.
source: Noticias
