Upgrade in front of the collapse

The permutations in the command of the grouping of Russian troops in Ukraine are analyzed primarily as an episode of hardware struggle. Most comments come down to the fact that the appointment of Valery Gerasimov as the head of the "Svo" is the victory of the Shoigu -Gerasimov clan over the Prigozhin -Kadyrov clan. Without denying the acute rivalry of the owner of the PMC Wagner and the leader of Chechnya with the Minister of Defense and the head of the General Staff, it must be emphasized that the decision to replace Sergei Surovikin Valery Gerasimov was not made by Shoigu, but by Putin.

Maybe Putin is concerned about the growth of Prigozhin? This is extremely doubtful. Prigozhin and Wagner are Putin's creature, and if necessary, the dictator can always send them into oblivion. Still, the main thing that Putin strives for is not a restriction on the influence of the Wagner PMC, but a military victory over Ukraine. And appointing the new commander of the "special operation", he was guided primarily by purely military considerations.

Obviously, Surovikin did not justify Putin's hopes. For three months of his command, Russian troops, which were forced to evacuated the Kherson bridgehead, did not achieve any significant success in the Donbass. The losses of the Wagnerians and regular Russian troops in the battles for Bakhmut and Soledar became record in the whole war. According to the Ukrainian side, they are ten times higher than the loss of the Armed Forces. At the same time, in Soledar, the capture of which was first announced by the Wagner PMC, and then the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, judging by the video materials from the Ukrainian side, the battles in the industrial zone are still ongoing.

But heavy losses in manpower themselves could not cause the displacement of Surovikin. People in Russia are not used to counting in Soviet times, and this tradition blooms with a magnificent color in Putin's rule. But for what "General Armageddon" will not be stolen on the head, and this is because with his continuous assaults of Bakhmut and attempts to advance at other points of Donbass, he created a shortage of artillery shells, not having achieved serious success. As a result, in the last week, Russian artillery was forced to reduce the consumption of shells by 3-4 times. This calls into question the ability of the Russian army to go to a large -scale offensive in the near future. For him, you still need to accumulate shells. The Wagnerians' detachments, putting their main forces under Bakhmut and Soledar, mainly from the former prisoners, are no longer able to make up for losses. The flow of replenishment from the zones is dried up, and now Prigogin’s people are trying to recruit prisoners-women in the PMC. There is no doubt that in the foreseeable future the Wagnerians, who are now, according to one of the Western intelligence, about a quarter of all Russian forces in Ukraine, will not be able to maintain the previous pace of flooding the enemy with corpses and their role in the war will fall. In this regard, the resignation of Surovikin close to Prigozhin looks quite logical.

Surovikin was also sadly famous for the fact that he began to apply systematic large -scale missile strikes on the energy infrastructure of Ukraine, without hiding the ultimate goal: to leave Ukrainians without warmth and light in the winter, to cause chaos and flight from cities both in rural areas and in Europe and thereby breaking the will of Ukrainians to struggle Europeans to support Ukraine. However, it is already clear that this calculation has not been justified. In the midst of winter, no chaos is observed, as well as the flows of refugees from large cities. Nevertheless, as evidenced by a large -scale missile blow to energy facilities on January 14, the new head of the "special operation" did not abandon the terrorist tactics of his predecessor. Probably because there are no other options left. In the same way, the Germans in the First and Second World Wars until the last held on an unlimited underwater war, as they saw in it the only way to break the will of England to fight.

Obviously, Putin already realized that he still could not find the outstanding commanders in the modern Russian army, and decided to begin to pack the general deck from the beginning again. Having at the head of the Gerasimov group, who became famous for the failure of the attack on Kyiv in February-March last year, Putin, in all likelihood, was guided by the following considerations. Gerasimov, remaining the chief of the General Staff and now directly responsible for the outcome of the war with Ukraine, will be able to attract the maximum resources - people, military equipment and ammunition - to achieve victory, because it knows better than others where all this can be scrasped on sulfur. And in the case of a new failure, a good reason to remove Gerasimov will appear not only from the command of the “special operation”, but also from the post of chief of the General Staff, if you manage to choose the right general for a replacement.

Gerasimov in the first weeks of the war struck the main blow to the most combat -ready units to Kyiv. There is a high probability that he will try to repeat the trip to the Ukrainian capital, when he can accumulate enough strength and funds in the Kiev direction. This offensive can be tried to distract Ukrainian forces from other directions and thereby weaken the expected Ukrainian offensive in the south. Although so far the formation of a Russian strike group in Belarus has not been noticed (it will have to be spent several weeks on its creation).

The only significant result that General Surovikin’s strategy led to accelerate the supply of Western weapons to Ukraine, and those that were previously refused to supply NATO countries. Seeing the example of the assault on Bakhmut and Soledar that the Russian army is still capable of conducting offensive operations and for a long time to delay the war, the United States and their allies have finally moved to the supply of modern armored vehicles to Ukraine, realizing that there was no other way to end the war, except for the military victory of Kyiv. And Russian terrorist attacks on Ukrainian energy structure helped to convince public opinion of this. Britain has already begun the supply of a party of 14 modern heavy tanks Challenger 2 to Ukraine. Poland is ready to give 10 Leopard 2 tanks. And there is hope that at a meeting in Ramstein on January 20, Germany’s resistance will finally be broken and large -scale supplies of Leopards to Ukraine from different NATO countries will begin.