Putin's new strongman?
"Army General Sergei Surovikin has been appointed commander of the combined group of troops in the area of special military operation" in Ukraine, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced 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 southern forces in Ukraine, according to a Russian ministry report from July.
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. This decision, which was, unusually, made public by Moscow, comes after a series of crushing defeats suffered by the Russian army in Ukraine.
A series of setbacks on the pitch
Moscow's forces were driven out of most of the Kharkiv region in the northeast in early September, thanks to a Ukrainian counter-offensive that allowed kyiv to retake 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 the hands of kyiv.
These setbacks provoked criticism within the Russian elite, with the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov castigating in particular the military command, while a senior parliamentary official, Andrei Kartapolov, publicly called on the army to "stop lying" about its defeats.
This announcement comes on the day of an explosion which partially destroyed the Crimean Bridge, a key infrastructure for supplying this peninsula annexed by Moscow and Russian forces in Ukraine, and dear to Vladimir Putin.
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