Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu on Saturday appointed General Sergei Sorovikin as the commander of Russian forces in the Special Military Operations Area in Ukraine.
The appointment of Sorovikin came hours following an explosion targeted the Crimean bridge, which links the Russian lands to the Crimean Peninsula, and is considered the only link between these two banks.
Sorovikin first gained notoriety during the 1991 coup attempt by Soviet hardliners, when he led a squad that passed through barricades set up by pro-democracy protesters, and three men were killed in the clash. His cruel reputation grew in 2004 when Russian media reported that a colonel working under him had killed himself following receiving a sharp reprimand from Sorovikin. Since then, he has been known for his “hard-line and unconventional” style of waging war.
“While we were carrying out combat missions in Syria, we did not forget for a moment that we were defending Russia,” Sergei Sorovikin, the new commander of Ukraine’s “special military operation”, told an elite army crowd at a ceremony in Moscow in 2017.
Sorovikin’s “defense” of Moscow’s interests in Syria included dozens of air and ground attacks on civilian targets and infrastructure, according to a 2020 Human Rights Watch report, which said that Russian forces under his command bombed “Syrian homes, schools, health facilities, and markets — places where People live, work and study in it,” according to the Guardian newspaper.
Destroy 300 Ukrainian regions
Yesterday morning, just two days following his appointment as commander-in-chief of war in Ukraine, Sorovikin began implementing his own style, with a series of missile attacks once morest civilian targets across Ukraine, which included a major crossroads near a university and a children’s playground in a park causing It caused power cuts and disruption of vital utilities in 300 regions throughout Ukraine.
A bloody history together
In Syria, Sorovikin took over the commander of the Russian forces in two terms; The first was between March 2017 and December 2017, and the second stage was between January and April 2019.
During the first period of his receipt, Syria witnessed major military events, the first of which was his presence at the head of the Russian forces, while targeting the opposition-controlled city of Khan Sheikhoun with chemical weapons in April 2017.
Where, on the morning of April 4, 2017, “at around 06:49, SU-22 fixed-wing aircraft belonging to the Syrian regime forces carried out an attack on the northern neighborhood of Khan Sheikhoun city with four missiles, one of which was loaded with poison gas,” according to a report by “Syrian Network for Human Rights”.
The attack resulted in the suffocation of 91 civilians, including 32 children and 23 women, and the injury of at least 520 others.
According to a report by the Syrian Network for Human Rights, the Russian forces supported al-Assad’s forces in the Khan Sheikhoun attack.
In a report issued in memory of the third massacre in 2020, the network said that it “documented the bombing of the city with several attacks, believed to be Russian, that targeted a medical center and the headquarters of the Syrian Civil Defense Organization, which were providing ambulance services to the victims of the chemical attack.”
Sorovikin was awarded the title of Hero of the Russian Federation for his military performance in Syria, in 2017.
Who is Soroviken?
Sorovikin was born in the Russian city of Novosibirsk in 1966. He joined the Omsk Joint Higher Arms Command School and then graduated from it in 1987.
In 1995 he graduated from the Command College of the Military Academy with honors, then graduated from the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation with honors in 2002.
Sorovikin held a range of leadership positions and participated in many wars, starting with Tajikistan in the 1990s and the Second Chechen War (1999-2000).
In 2005, he began assuming important military positions, the first of which was in 2005 when he assumed the mission of Deputy Chief of Staff, passing through his leadership of the Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff between 2008 and 2010, before becoming the commander of the Eastern Military District in 2013.
He is very cruel but a competent leader
Gleb Erisov, a former Air Force lieutenant who worked with Sorovikin until 2020, said the new general was one of the few people in the army who “knew how to supervise and organize the different branches of the army.” “He is very ruthless but also a competent leader … But he will not be able to solve all the problems,” Irisov explained. Russia suffers from a shortage of weapons and manpower.” Erisov noted previous leadership changes that have done little to fix Russia’s military problems in Ukraine. Sorovikin’s appointment, however, tempered public anger among Russian hardliners, who are increasingly impatient with the country’s military failures.
Since his stay in Syria, Irisov said, he has developed a good working relationship with the Wagner private military group, and has welcomed his appointment by major critics of the war effort, including Ramzan Kadyrov, the president of the Chechen Republic, and Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin. “Now, I am 100 percent satisfied with the operation,” Kadyrov wrote on his Telegram channel yesterday, referring to the heavy bombing of Kyiv.
