Another month, another Russian military reshuffle: Vladimir Putin changes the general in charge of his forces in Ukraine with something of the frequency of a Premier League club desperate to secure immediate success.
It is obvious that such inconsistency demonstrates that the Kremlin is dissatisfied with the conduct of the war but the decision to put Gen Valery Gerasimov, the head of the armed forces, in charge of the invasion is eye-catching for other reasons too.
Demoted to being one of three deputies is Gen Sergei Surovikin after just three months in charge. That raises the obvious question of whether there will be any change in strategy as the war grinds towards a dismal one-year mark.
Surovikin, commander of the aerospace forces, earned the nickname “General Armageddon” after ordering the destruction of Aleppo from the air in 2016 to break rebel resistance, which led to the fall of the Syrian city later that year.
The grimly similar attempt to bomb Ukraine’s energy grid to destruction during his tenure seems to have failed, and there is growing western confidence that Moscow is running short of the guided missiles needed to sustain the effort.
Interestingly, some of the Russian military bloggers most closely followed by western experts were notably cynical about the change. “The change of places does not change the sum of the parts,” said one.
Given Russia’s poor and chaotic military performance so far, the bloggers have a point. Gerasimov, as head of the military, was always Surovikin’s senior and so in a sense it is not obvious much has changed – although it now means Gerasimov is more closely tied to the war effort.
Yet even that is not quite as new as it first appears. At the end of April, Gerasimov went to the frontline to personally supervise an effort to break through from Izium, such was the Kremlin’s dissatisfaction with the performance of commanders on the ground. The Ukrainians discovered his presence, and it is believed he was wounded after the command post where he was based was bombed.
In any event, it is the Russian president who is overseeing the military strategy to a fairly close degree, and is engaged, western intelligence says, at brigade and even battalion-level decision-making. But, and this greatly helps Ukraine, experts say the Putin grand plan is often opaque or incomprehensible.
Russia, argues Ed Arnold from the Royal United Services Institute thinktank, is suffering from broken command and control.
“Political objectives are confused,” he said, highlighting Putin’s unclear goal to “denazify” Ukraine, a country without any Nazis. “This cannot be translated into a military objective.”
At the start of the war, Arnold highlights, many Russia soldiers were not told what their true mission was. Now it is unclear what Russia’s endgame is, given its forces clearly cannot conquer Ukraine, or even the whole of the Donbas, despite months of fighting in Bakhmut and nearby Soledar.
A more likely scenario is that the latest reshuffle is political, coming just at the moment when Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner private military group appears to be, finally, making ground in Soledar. As Prigozhin not very tactfully claimed earlier this week: “No one except for Wagner took part in the storm of Soledar.”
Such is the degeneration of Russia’s regular forces following nearly 11 months of war that Wagner was estimated by the west this week to account for “a quarter or more of Russian combatants” in Ukraine.
Prigozhin and Surovikin are allies, who many believe hope to usurp the Kremlin military establishment of Gerasimov and his immediate boss, defence minister Sergei Shoigu.
Sir Lawrence Freedman, author of Command, a book about the politics of military operations, said: “My suspicion is that this is a move by the old guard against what was seen to be a Prigozhin-Surovikin axis, prompted by Wagner’s propaganda about the Soledar-Bakhmut battle and complaints about Gerasimov’s lack of support.”
That would suggest that Putin is trying to balance tensions between Wagner and the regular army, rather than develop any fresh military strategy.
“The fact that Putin keeps on trying new command arrangements suggests that he is struggling to find one that delivers what he wants,” Freedman added.
