This decision, which was, unusually, made public by Moscow, comes after several defeats suffered by the Russian army in Ukraine.
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This is the consequence of a series of bitter setbacks on the ground. The Russian army announced on Saturday, October 8, the appointment of a new commander in Ukraine. “Army General Sergei Surovikin was appointed commander of the combined group of troops in the area of the special military operation” in Ukraine, the Russian Defense Ministry wrote on Telegram.
Sergei Surovikin, 55, is a veteran of the civil war in Tajikistan in the 1990s, the second Chechnya 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 Russian ministry report from July.
This decision was made public by Moscow, a rare occurrence. The name of his predecessor has never been officially revealed, but according to Russian media it was General Alexander Dvornikov, also a veteran of the second Chechen war and commander of Russian forces in Syria from 2015 to 2016.
Moscow’s forces were driven out of most of the Kharkiv region in the northeast in early September, thanks to a Ukrainian counter-offensive. Russian troops also lost 500 square kilometers of territory in the Kherson region of southern Ukraine. The setbacks have drawn criticism from Russia’s elite, including Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and senior parliamentarian Andrei Kartapolov.