Kremlin ousts Surovikin and appoints Gerasimov as commander of troops in Ukraine

The Kremlin has once again made a personnel reshuffle in the military leadership of the Russian army, which is on the territory of Ukraine.

Valeriy Gerasimov, the head of the Russian General Staff, will now command the occupying army. The previous general, Sergey Surovikin, held his post for 3.5 months. Propagandists proudly called Surovikin "General Armageddon" for his style of command in Syria. In fact, Surovikin was no different from other commanders in Syria - it was common for them to bomb civilians and destroy infrastructure. The Russians decided to apply the same technique to Ukrainians - since October the occupiers regularly hit citizens

Now "Armageddon General" Surovikin has been hastily demoted to the rank of only Gerasimov's deputy.

These reshuffles in the Russian army have already been commented on by the General Staff of the AFU at a briefing on January 12. According to the Ukrainian military, frequent personnel changes in the leadership of the occupation troops indicate problems in the management of Russian troops.

We monitor that periodically there are personnel changes in the leadership of the occupying country's armed forces. If they were doing well, personnel changes would not take place with such frequency. The latest personnel changes indicate that there is a need in their ranks for combining the command and control system of the troops. Not everything works out the way they want it to.

As for the newly appointed Valeriy Gerasimov, he has long been in the military structure of the Russian army, having served in the Russian Far Eastern and Baltic military districts as far back as the 1990s, and in 1999 he was appointed chief of staff of the North Caucasus Military District, the BBC reports.

He took part in the Second Chechen War. He was then in command of units of the Russian army which took part in the fighting.

Later, he also served as commander of the military districts of St Petersburg, Moscow and the Central Military District, a large part of central Russia.

In 2005, he became head of the Main Directorate for Combat Training and Service of the Russian Armed Forces. Following Sergei Shoigu's appointment as Russian Defence Minister in 2012, Gerasimov became his first deputy and head of the Russian Armed Forces General Staff.

For Ukrainians, Gerasimov is known primarily for surviving an attack by the Ukrainian army while on the front lines. The New York Times later reported that the US tried to dissuade Ukraine from eliminating Gerasimov when he visited the temporarily occupied territories. But Ukraine did not listen.

In addition, in one of his interviews, the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Valeriy Zaluzhniy, said that he had read all of Gerasimov's books and had closely studied the activities of this Russian military commander.

Experts believe that Putin has put Gerasimov in charge of the occupying forces in Ukraine because he wants to restore offensive operations in 2023.

It is likely to be a two-pronged affair:

• Luhansk region - the most likely scenario;
• from Belarus to northern Ukraine.

In addition, according to ISW analysts, Surovikin was a favourite of Prigozhin's public and a rival of Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu. Experts believe that such actions could lead to an even greater division of the Russian information space by a faction of the security forces.