As Russian troops wage a ferocious house-to-house fight for control of strongholds in eastern Ukraine, a parallel battle is unfolding in the top echelons of military power in Moscow, with President Vladimir Putin reshuffling his top generals while rival camps try to win his favour.
The fighting for the salt mining town of Soledar and the nearby city of Bakhmut has highlighted a bitter rift between the Russian Defense Ministry leadership and Yevgeny Prigozhin, a rogue millionaire whose private military force known as the Wagner Group has played an increasingly visible role in Ukraine.
While both have pledged loyalty to Putin, their public attacks on his top generals openly challenged the Kremlin's monopoly on such criticism, something that Russia's tightly controlled political system hadn't seen before. Russian troops were forced to retreat from Kyiv after a botched attempt to capture the Ukrainian capital in the opening weeks of the war. In the fall, they hastily pulled back from the northeastern Kharkiv region and the southern city of Kherson under the brunt of a swift Ukrainian counteroffensive.
Stanovaya argued that Gerasimov could have asked for "carte blanche in the heat of verbal battles against the background of some very tense discussions." For Putin, "this is maneuvering, a tug-of-war between Surovikin and Gerasimov," she added. Mark Galeotti, who specializes in Russian military and security affairs at University College, London, said the appointment handed Gerasimov "the most poisoned of chalices" as he now will bear direct responsibility for any more setbacks.
Prigozhin, meanwhile, has taken advantage of military setbacks in Ukraine to expand his clout by making the Wagner Group a pivotal element of the Russian fighting force, augmenting the regular army that has suffered a heavy attrition.
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