The humiliating decision by Moscow forces to withdraw from the Ukrainian city of Kherson this month united Russia’s top waterhawks, but the commander who advocated the move said it was worth it and he is now under pressured to prove it.
Sergei Surovikin, nicknamed “General Armageddon” by the Russian media for his reputed ruthlessness, on November 9th recommended Moscow’s forces quit Kherson and the west bank of the River Dnipro where they were dangerously exposed.
General Armageddon a 56-year-old veteran of wars in Chechnya and Syria who has been decorated by president Vladimir Putin, argued the withdrawal, completed two days later, would allow Moscow to save equipment and redeploy forces there – estimated by the United States at 30,000-strong – to offensives elsewhere.
Some of these troops were then transferred from southern Ukraine, where heavy fighting is raging, to eastern Ukraine, and the winner of the Hero of Russia award will show that his gamble was right as winter approaches.
“We await your brilliant results and pray for you, I pray for you every day,” Margarita Simonyan, the hawkish editor-in-chief of RT TV and one of the main public proponents of the war, told Surovikin in a TV broadcast last week.
Simonyan urged Surovikin, a hulking shaven-headed figure who has been shown on TV speaking in clipped Russian military language, to ignore “nonsense” from critics, a reference to influential military bloggers unhappy about his retreat.
One of those bloggers, Vladlen Tatarsky, who has more than half a million followers on the Telegram messaging service, had fumed over Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s post-retreat visit to Kherson, questioning why Moscow had not killed him.
“What are we spilling our blood for? Why can Zelenskiy calmly come to Kherson?” Tatarsky asked in a video post.
“Symbolically it would have been great if a Geran (type of drone) had landed on his stupid head but it didn’t happen. Why? Either we fight a full-on war or … nothing will work out.”
Alexander Dugin; Russian arch-nationalist whose daughter Darya was murdered outside Moscow in August in what Russia says was a Ukrainian state assassination, has piled more pressure on Surovikin, saying Kherson was the last chunk of Ukrainian territory that Russia could afford to give up.
“The limit has been reached,” Dugin told the nationalist online news outlet Tsargrad.
Senior Russian government officials and war hawks say they want Kherson back at some point, which looks hard to achieve anytime soon.
Nor is taking new ground in the east against a highly motivated and Western-equipped Ukrainian military an easy task, especially in the winter.