Explainer | Who is General Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s new commander in Ukraine?
- Valery Gerasimov’s Ukraine appointment is the most dramatic in a series of senior command changes since Russia invaded in February
- Gerasimov is the Russian military’s highest-ranking official after Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, and has access to nuclear codes
The decision to appoint the country’s top soldier to lead an offensive on the ground in Ukraine is extremely unusual and could be a last-ditch effort by President Vladimir Putin to resuscitate his offensive after a series of defeats.
Here’s what’s known about Gerasimov, Russia’s chief of the general staff.
Criticism
Many of the nationalist war bloggers who have licence from the Kremlin to criticise the conduct of the war have blamed Gerasimov for the fact that a superpower military – supposedly modernised and expensively re-equipped in the last 15 years – has failed so signally to subjugate its much smaller neighbour.
Critics in Ukraine, the West and even inside Russia cast the Russian armed forces as naive, poorly prepared and equipped, slow to react, and riven by disparate and often distant command structures.
After the failure of an unplanned mobilisation campaign to turn the tide in Russia’s favour, rumours had swirled for months that Gerasimov, largely invisible to the public, would be sidelined.
Both Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner Group contract militia, and Ramzan Kadyrov, leader of the southern Russian republic of Chechnya, have made thinly veiled criticisms of Gerasimov while demonstratively claiming battlefield successes for their own, supposedly superior, semi-autonomous forces.