Generals burn like matches, the Ukrainian invasion launched by the Kremlin on February 24th. The last match was the colonel general Gennady Zhidko, never officially proclaimed head of the “Special Operation” (like none of the previous ones) but in fact responsible for an advance which instead turned into an unexpected, painful retreat under the fire of the counter-offensive. In place of him, here is another general with a heavy resume, the 55-year-old Sergey Surovikin.
Veteran of Syria and Chechnya
Veteran of the carnage in Chechnya and Syria, he has 4 children but even this does not seem to be the sign of any humanity: during the failed coup of 1991 he sent his tanks to quell the protests, and at least three civilians ended up under the tracks. According to the Ukrainian reports, among other things, he is not even a virgin of the massacres in the special operation: in March this year the investigators of “The Insider” called him “the director of the bombings in Ukraine”, and Kiev suspects he has led a series of advances and sieges including the encirclement of Gorsky and Zolote in the Lugansk region. In the West they paint it as “an example of corruption and cruelty”, but this is still part of the propaganda game.
In any case, now Putin officially entrusted him with the keys to the whole wretched invasion, the one that was to end in three days waving the Russian flags in Kiev and instead we know how it went: almost eight months later it is a drama with very few successes, many deaths and an impressive amount of defeats. After the February blitzkrieg ended badly, the Kremlin had tried to shuffle the cards by pinning the responsibility for the war operations to the general Alexander Dvornikov, called “the butcher” for his rather unscrupulous martial nature sown in Chechnya and blossomed in Syria. He signed a long sequence of cowardly massacres with long-range missiles, he gutted Mariupol by conquering the rubble but he too ended up in the meat grinder of the Kremlin’s dissatisfaction.
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Repeated changes at the top
In early July, when it became clear that Moscow’s hoped-for rapid advance had become a cemetery for soldiers burned to conquer a few hundred meters a day, Dvornikov was brutally sacked: his post as commander of the Southern Military District, responsible for operations. in the occupied territories of Ukraine, it had been entrusted to Surovkin; but the management of the Special Operation had been spun off and entrusted to Zhidko. He too was burned, now, by the deep Ukrainian counter-offensive and by a sequence of defeats that culminated in the emblematic images of the Crimean bridge gutted by an explosion.
Putin, who continues to bang his fist on the table and insist on his Special Operation, now needs victories. In Moscow, the circles close to the Kremlin are expecting “an important response”, violent and equally striking: the move will be up to General Surovkin, who from today has the club in hand for the invasion of Ukraine. In Kiev they say he is a supporter of massive missile attacks on infrastructure, including civilian ones and regardless of possible innocent victims. If the strategy is to make the Ukrainians spend a cold winter attacking the energy infrastructures, as the services fear, he will be the one to have the reins.
Training
Born in Novosibirsk, graduated with honors from the “MV Frunze” Military Academy – the one that has produced generations of Red Army officers since 2018 when it was opened – he specialized at the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces and then served in Tajikistan, becoming commander of motorized rifle units in Yekaterinburg, Chechnya and Voronez.
His career continued up to the main operational direction of the Russian General Staff: he was Chief of Staff at the Volga-Ural Military District, and he too made his bones and earned his nickname fighting in Tajikistan, in the Second Chechen War and then in Syria: “General Armageddon”, the Russians call him in the military telegram channels.
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Hero of Russia
Since 2017 he was the commander-in-chief of the Russian aerospace forces, and on his chest he pinned the “Golden Star of the Hero of Russia”. From 2021 he has the rank of general of the army. But the honors course has several spots.
The newspaper Novaya Gazeta he recalls that in 1991 Surovikin, by decision of the “State Emergency Committee” which led the failed coup, personally led a column of armored vehicles, which crushed some demonstrators during the August putsch. For this he was arrested and spent about seven months in the Matrosskaya Tishina Preventive Detention Center, but came out unscathed and with a promotion.
In 1995 he ends up in trouble again: sentenced to one year of probation for arms and ammunition trafficking, the penalty here again canceled by a complete rehabilitation with withdrawal of the charges. Difficult character, in 2004 he beat up Lieutenant Colonel Viktor Chibizov. A month later, Colonel Andrei Shtakal shot himself a pistol: it was in front of him, who apparently had severely criticized him.
Other times. The present is a war that is entering the cold of winter but shows no signs of freezing: it will be he who will write the next chapters, hoping that negotiations will reopen to stop this crazy dance on the brink of nuclear abyss.