The head of the special military operation in Ukraine has a new face. The Russian government has appointed General Sergei Surovikin to take its helm, the Russian news agency TASS revealed on Saturday. The general previously led the Southern Force Group in Ukraine and previously held the post of commander of Russian forces in Syria.
The general will be tasked with leading the “combined grouping of troops in the area of special military operation” in Ukraine. The 55-year-old father of two daughters is a veteran of Tajikistan’s civil war in the 1990s, the second Chechnya war in the 2000s and the Russian intervention in Syria initiated in 2015. He had been sentenced in 1995 to a prison term for arms trafficking (and finally released). Earlier in 1991, for six months, for having caused the death of three demonstrators opposed to the putsch aimed at overthrowing Mikhail Gorbachev by sending 12 armored combat vehicles. Before taking charge of the special operation in Ukraine, he led the “South” group of forces in Ukraine.
“Acts of torture and humiliation”
How is it perceived in the West? According to the British Ministry of Defence, Sergei Surovikin is a “notoriously corrupt and brutal general, even by the standards of the Russian army”. Interviewed by the newspaper Le Figaro, Dimitri Minic, Russian army specialist at Ifri’s Russia/NIS Center, reports that his men committed “acts of torture and humiliation” during the second Chechen war in 2004-2005. A report published by the Jamestown Foundation records that his “brilliant career” is characterized by a “readiness to vigorously carry out every order” asked of him.
What were Sergei Surovikin’s first military decisions? The man escalated the violence of the conflict, ordering strikes on five Ukrainian cities on Monday, October 10: kyiv, Lviv, Ternopil, Dnipro and Zaporizhia were hit with missiles and drones.
Surovikin would succeed the “butcher of Syria”
According to rumors, he would thus succeed General Alexander Dvornikov. A simple assumption: usually, the Kremlin does not officially announce the appointment of its officials. Dvornikov has a profile similar to that of Surovikin: he experienced many conflicts and played a central role in the Russian defense for having carried out military operations in Syria and Chechnya – he was then nicknamed “the butcher of Syria”.
In 2015, he had contributed to the destruction of the city of Aleppo. In the conflict, at the heart of the Arab Spring movement, Russia displayed its closeness to the leader Bashar al-Assad. In 2016, Alexander Dvornikov will be decorated with the Hero of Russia medal by Vladimir Putin for his exploits, which suffered few losses of Russian soldiers. Will his successor Sergei Surovikin receive the same laurels?