Russia replaces commander of its Ukraine offensive amid defeats

The Russian military announced on Saturday the appointment of a new commander for its “special military operation” in Ukraine after a series of bitter setbacks on the ground and signs of growing discontent among elites over the conduct of the conflict.

“Army General Sergei Surovikin has been appointed commander of the combined group of troops in the area of ​​special military operations” in Ukraine, the Russian Defense Ministry announced on Telegram.

The name of his predecessor was never revealed.

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 launched in 2015. Until then, he led the group of forces “South” in Ukraine, according to a July Russian ministry report.

The name of his predecessor has never been officially revealed, but according to Russian media he 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, which was unusually made public by Moscow, comes after a series of crushing defeats suffered by the Russian military in Ukraine.

Moscow’s forces were pushed out of much of the northeastern Kharkiv region in early September by a Ukrainian counteroffensive that allowed Kyiv to recapture thousands of square kilometers of territory.

Russian troops also lost 500 square kilometers of territory in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine and narrowly escaped encirclement in Lyman, a logistics hub now in Kyiv hands.

These setbacks have sparked criticism within the Russian elite, with Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov criticizing the military command in particular, while a senior parliamentary official, Andrei Kartapolov, has publicly called on the military to “stop lying” about its defeats.

This announcement comes on the day of an explosion that partially destroyed the Crimean Bridge, a key infrastructure for supplying this peninsula annexed by Moscow and the Russian forces in Ukraine, and wanted by Vladimir Putin.