Will military personnel reshuffles help Russia
2023.01.11 13:21
Will military personnel reshuffles help Russia
By Tiffany Smith
Budrigannews.com – After months of defeats on the battlefield, Russia gave its top general the order to lead its failing invasion of Ukraine on Wednesday. This was the biggest shakeup yet of its broken military command structure.
It did this a day after the Wagner contract militia leader said the town was under Russian control, Russian forces struggled to maintain control of the small east Ukrainian salt mining town of Soledar despite suffering a lot of casualties.
After a series of retreats prior to Ukrainian counter-offensives, Soledar would be Russia’s most significant gain since August.
After more than ten months of war, Wagner is one of a number of semi-autonomous Russian forces whose high battlefield profile has highlighted the ineffectiveness of Russia’s core military in a campaign that the Kremlin had anticipated would be finished in days.
According to the Russian Defense Ministry, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov has been appointed as the overall commander of forces for what Moscow refers to as its “special military operation” in Ukraine.
The move not only made Gerasimov directly responsible for the campaign’s outcome, but it also effectively degraded General Sergei Surovikin, who the Russian media refer to as “General Armageddon” due to his reputed brutality.
A ministry statement stated, “The need to organize closer contact between different branches of the armed forces, and improve the quality… and effectiveness of the management of Russian forces.” “The increase in the level of leadership of the special military operation is connected with the expansion in the scale of tasks.”
One well-known military blogger who writes under the name Rybar on the messaging app Telegram said, “The sum does not change, just by changing the places of its parts.”
He claimed that Surovikin, a veteran of Russian operations in Syria and Chechnya, was being blamed for a number of recent mishaps involving the Russian military. These mishaps included a Ukrainian attack on a Russian barracks in the town of Makiivka that resulted in the deaths of at least 89 Russian soldiers, including conscripts, on New Year’s Day.
After a series of Ukrainian offensives that turned the tide of the war and brought attention to poor Russian forces’ training, equipment, and morale, Surovikin was appointed Russia’s top battlefield commander in Ukraine only last October.
Even though the Russians appeared to have the upper hand, intense fighting broke out between Ukrainian and Russian forces on Wednesday over Soledar, a stepping stone in Moscow’s plan to capture Ukraine’s entire Donbas region.
Despite the presence of pockets of Ukrainian resistance in the town’s center, Wagner, the assault’s leader, claimed control on Tuesday.
Soledar had been cut off from the north and south by airborne units, according to the Russian Defense Ministry on Wednesday.
However, Ukraine denied that the town, which had approximately 10,000 residents prior to the war, had been destroyed.
On Telegram, Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar wrote, “Heavy fighting continues in Soledar.”
“The enemy has replaced its units once more after suffering losses, has increased the number of Wagner fighters, and is attempting to break through our forces’ defenses and completely seize the city, but is unable to do so.”
Additionally, the Kremlin did not declare victory and acknowledged significant casualties.
“Don’t rush; wait for official announcements. Dmitry Peskov, a spokesperson for the Kremlin, stated, “There is a positive dynamic in progress.”
The situation in Soledar was not independently verified by Reuters. However, a Reuters photographer who recently reached the town’s outskirts reported that many residents had fled in the freezing cold along roads out of the city.
She stated that ambulances were awaiting wounded on the road between Soledar and Bakhmut, that smoke was visible rising over the town, that the incoming artillery fire was unrelenting, and that the town was under fire.
Soledar has been used as a platform by Russia to attack Bakhmut, a nearby city that has resisted Russian attacks for months and serves as a supply line hub in eastern Ukraine.
Peskov reiterated previous statements made by the Kremlin, which stated that Moscow would prefer to achieve its objectives through political and diplomatic means. However, he stated that there was no immediate possibility of negotiations due to the West’s and Ukraine’s positions, which call for a complete Russian withdrawal from all occupied Ukrainian territory. They have deemed Russian statements regarding talks to be nothing more than propaganda.
Even though fighting continued in the town center, Vevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner private militia and a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, stated late on Tuesday that Wagner units had seized “the entire territory” of Soledar.
A photograph on Wagner’s Telegram channel appeared to show Prigozhin and his fighters inside a mine, according to the Russian state news agency RIA. Wagner claimed to have taken control of Soledar’s salt mines.
According to Denis Pushilin, the head of the Russian-held part of Donetsk province, Soledar’s capture would make it possible to take more important towns further west in the Donetsk People’s Republic, which Russia recognizes as the center of Ukrainian heavy industry and one of four provinces that Moscow claims to have “annexed.”
Michael Kofman, a U.S. analyst, stated that Russia would pay a high price for winning in Soledar. However, he added on Twitter that the conflict could also harm Ukraine’s plans for counter-offensives and increase Bakhmut’s pressure.
On February 24, Russia sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine, claiming that Kyiv’s close ties to the West and plans to join NATO posed a threat to its safety. Moscow is accused by Kyiv and its allies of starting an unprovoked war to take territory from a neighbor it used to control in the former Soviet Union.
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