A much deeper and more significant change than it seems. On Wednesday, the Russian Defense Minister announced that he had appointed General Valery Gerassimov as the new commander-in-chief of his Ukrainian offensive to replace Sergei Surovikin, in this same role for only three short months.
If this waltz of generals can be read as a sanction to Surovikin for successive military failures on the ground in recent weeks, including the loss of Kherson, Sergei Jirnov, a former KGB intelligence officer, goes further in his analysis.
Invited to BFMTV on Thursday, he believes that “what happened yesterday, in my opinion, is as crucial as February 24, 2022” and the start of the Russian invasion.
scale change
According to him, the choice of this man, who is the highest-ranking soldier in the country, is “a major change in the character of the war” by Vladimir Putin.
“Until now it was a special operation for the Russians, that means we took a small contingent, we put some generals in charge of that contingent, and we tried to improvise a small war,” he details.
However, the presence of Guerassimov causes him to “completely change the scale” with the conflict. “He is the number one soldier in the country, who gives orders to all the other soldiers. Above him is only the defense minister, who is a politician, even though he wears the ‘uniform, and Putin’.
Furthermore, this same Sergei Jirnov also casts the shadow of a tougher war in the Ukraine and puts nuclear risk back into the equation. “Gerasimov is the one who, among the three characters of the Russian state, has the nuclear briefcase, the nuclear codes, that means that he no longer needs to go through anyone.”
However, the use of nuclear weapons must be qualified. In the military doctrine that bears his name, Gerasimov separates this type of weapon in the framework of the hybrid war defined there.
different paradigm
This theory of the change of scale is validated by Alexandre Melnik, a former diplomat in Moscow who was also a guest on our antenna this Thursday.
“There is a paradigm shift,” he confirms.
“We are moving away from the lexical field of the remote military operation, which does not concern the whole country, and we are sliding towards a real war that impacts Russian society as a whole. This is Putin’s last cartridge, to give this patriotic impulse, involving the whole nation is the way out for Putin, ”he concludes.
Source: BFM TV
