“General of the Army Sergei Sorovikin has been appointed commander of the combined group of forces in the Special Military Operation Zone” in Ukraine, the Russian Defense Ministry announced on Telegram.
Surovikin, 55, had previously participated in the civil war in Tajikistan during the 1990s, in the second Chechen war at the beginning of the third millennium, and in the Russian intervention in Syria, which began in 2015.
Until now, he commanded the “South” group of forces in Ukraine, according to a report by the Russian Defense Ministry dating back to July.
His predecessor’s name was never officially revealed, but the Russian media indicated that he was General Alexander Dvornikov, who in turn participated in the second Chechen war and commanded Russian forces in Syria in 2015 and 2016.
This decision, announced by Moscow, comes in a rare event, after a series of major failures of the Russian army in Ukraine, where the Russian forces expelled in early September from the largest part of the Kharkiv region (northeast) after a Ukrainian counterattack that allowed Kiev to regain control of thousands of square kilometers of its territory.
Also, the Russian forces lost 500 square kilometers of land in the Kherson region in southern Ukraine, and with great difficulty escaped from the cordon around the strategic town of Lyman, which is now under the control of Ukrainian forces.
These defeats sparked criticism within the Russian elite, and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov attacked the military leadership, while parliamentary official Andrei Kartapolov publicly called on the army to “stop lying.”
The replacement of the commander of the Russian forces in Ukraine coincided with an explosion that partially destroyed the Crimean bridge, which constitutes a major artery for the delivery of supplies to the peninsula annexed by Moscow and to its forces in Ukraine.
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