Three months after a fanfare appointment as a single commander of the Russian forces deployed in the field, General Sourovikine is removed from this function and replaced by Valéri Guerassimov.
by Benoît Vitkine (Moscow, correspondent)
The management of Russian “special military operation” in Ukraine is experiencing new upheavals. Only three months after his appointment as a sole commander of maneuvers on the ground, General Sergei Sourovikine was removed from this function on Wednesday, January 11. According to the press release from the Ministry of Defense, it was replaced by Valéré Guerassimov, who will accumulate this charge with that of chief of staff of the Russian army which he has occupied since 2012. Sergei Sourovikine is demoted to the rank of Deputy, alongside generals Oleg Salioukov and Alexei Kim.
This change of direction is not the first since the offensive triggering in Ukraine on February 24, 2022. But it is remarkable in more than one way – and not only because the new operations chief, Reputed to be one of the theorists of the hybrid war, is well known.
Sergei Sourovikine was the first commander of the forces deployed in Ukraine to benefit from enlarged powers, to his appointment in October 2022, to try to solve the coordination problems observed on the ground. Then, it was the Kremlin himself who had chosen, unusually, to mediate this figure. State propaganda had thus transformed the arrival of this “General Armageddon”, into a major event, likely to change the situation after the successful Ukrainian military counter-offensives this summer. Kherson
The sudden eviction of this high ranking has taken short in Russia itself, even in circles close to power unconvinced by the Sibylline press release which explains these movements by “an enlargement of the magnitude of the missions to be accomplished and the need to carry out a narrower interaction between the components of the armed forces “. The specialized Telegram channel Rybar, well informed but under the strict control of the authorities, does not hesitate to evoke the “questionable” results of General Sourovikine. The analysis coincides with that of British intelligence, which in its daily public report, believes that his departure constitutes a “recognition” of Russian failures.
The arrival of the general, on October 8, 2022, had gone through the launch of a massive bombing campaign on Ukrainian civil infrastructure. Intended to push Ukrainian society and bring it to capitulation, this strategy has not given the expected results. Sourovikine’s mission will also remain like that of the withdrawal of the Russian troops from Kherson, the first taken after the start of the offensive in February 2022, and which Moscow considers one of its regional capitals. Then, there was the Ukrainian strike on Makiïvka, in Donbass, which killed, on the evening of December 31, tens, even hundreds of Russian soldiers mobilized – the Ministry of Defense sticks to an official assessment of 89 dead.
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