this will be the war with the Butcher of Aleppo

What came to be called “war of attrition”, that is, excessive violence against civilian population centers to cause the enemy to panic and surrender, was the preferred strategy of the kremlin in March and April. There is much talk that this is a reaction of one who has his back against the wall, but it is easily forgotten that, when he seemed to be winning, Putin ordered the bombing of kyiv, the massacres in Bucha, the missiles on maternity and theater Mariupol, full of homeless families, or the massacre at the Kramatorsk train station.

In that sense, it can be said that the war returns to the starting point. This is what the regime’s “hawks” have been asking for in different media since the fall of the Kharkov front and, later, that of northern Kherson made it impossible to continue defending the theory of a slow-burn Russian victory. Even former president Dmitri Medvedev does not stop insisting on the nuclear threat as soon as he has an opportunityrepeating like a parrot that it is the West that leaves them no choice but to escalate and escalate their military response.

[Putin bombardea Kiev y otras ciudades ucranianas: al menos 11 muertos y más de 64 heridos]

What has been shown yesterday is that between the use of unconventional weapons, a move that would lead Russia to disaster, and the apparent inaction of recent months, there is a middle ground. The explosion of the Kerch Strait bridge in Crimea may have served as an excuse, but what lies behind these attacks on playgrounds and office buildings in different Ukrainian towns is actually the cold calculation of a man who has earned a reputation in the military world for his ruthlessness and utter lack of scruples: General Sergei Surovikin.

The “General Armageddon”

Surovikin went down in the books of ignominy thanks to his campaign of terror in Aleppo, during the syrian civil war. Surovikin, along with the dismissed Alexander Dvornikov, was one of those most responsible for the continuous bombing of the second most populous city in Syria and where most of the enemies of the Syrian regime took refuge. Bashar al-Assad. Those bombings killed hundreds of civilians, including children, and capped off a savage two-year operation that included the continued use of chemical weapons.

[El espectacular vídeo que muestra cómo los soldados ucranianos interceptan un misil ruso]

Surovikin also has experience as a soldier in Afghanistan, Tajikistan and the second Chechen war.. Since adolescence, wherever the Soviet Union or Russia have needed someone ruthless to push the orders of his superiors to the limit, Surovikin has been there. His appointment last week as commander-in-chief of the Russian forces in Ukraine, with the tacit support of Eugeni Prigozhin, director of the Wagner Group, already indicated a possible return to the worst habits of last spring.

Now, the question remains what Surovikin is capable of that Dvornikov had not previously contemplated and discarded. Rather it seems like a cosmetic change, a transfer to the most nationalist groups around the Kremlin. The “General Armageddon”, as the British press has called him, has begun its journey in Ukraine with a disproportionate attack, but apparently ineffective from a strategic point of view in the absence of specifying the magnitude of the damage. If bombing playgrounds is already morally abject, in military terms it is innocuous. Nothing to do with what Ukraine did on Saturday, ie damage the main troop supply passage from Crimea to Kherson, Zaporizhia and southern Donetsk. Something that can change the course of the war on the southern front.

Terror to defeat

We can get used to this asymmetry as we got used to at the beginning of the war. To brutal demonstrations of force that appear non-existent superiority to the delight of the pro-Russian media. After seven and a half months of war, both sides are running out of weapons. One option is to use it with surgical precision on the points that can decide the combat on the ground and another option is to do it with the sole purpose of frightening a population and a government that are already scared.

So far, everything we know about Monday’s attacks affects the civilian population. People burning in cars, trapped under rubble, without electricity, without water, without basic supplies… Now, along the way, Russia has not recovered an inch. The consequences of this supposed change in tactics will depend on Surovikin’s ability to learn from past mistakes and spend his missiles on military targets, even if they don’t sell as much. This is what Ukraine did all summer: punish the rear of the enemy army and break it down until it had no choice but to flee at the first serious attack.

[Las lecciones que podemos aprender de Kennedy en la crisis de los misiles para no liarla con Putin]

Is Surovikin there? We do not know. Perhaps Macron knows this and that is why he has said what he has said. Russia’s resources will always be more limited than he publicly acknowledges. His concept of “escalation” is purely media, following a logic based on terror against effectiveness. They are going to do what causes the most noise, that covers the most cope, that causes the greatest sense of danger in the West. The only objective remains that, sooner or later, both the NATO as the European Union cease in his support for Ukraine for fear of something even more serious. The aforementioned nuclear escalation that Medvedev has been defending for some time.

lack of scruples

That said, the ways of unconventional warfare are not safe for anyone. You can afford them when fighting opposition to a Syrian dictator in a defenseless city. At the level of superpowers, the issue is more delicate. for now, What this attack makes clear is that the West must get better anti-aircraft batteries to Ukraine.. In this sense, there is not the slightest sign of a step backwards in the defense of the independence of the country led by Volodimir Zelensky.

The “Russian method” of combat -and it doesn’t matter who you put there: Gerasimov, Dvornikov, Surovikin…- has always been based on crushing. Can the current invading army crush the Ukrainian troops? It does not seem. Could you lower their morale with attacks on civilians? It wasn’t like that in the spring. Would he achieve this using tactical nukes? It would have to use so many to achieve a noticeable effect on the battlefront that it is almost impossible for its consequences not to end up affecting the Russian army and population itself.

[Putin utilizará la anexión de Jersón, Zaporiyia y el Donbás como coartada de un posible ataque nuclear]

Russia’s problems in these months of war have not been due to lack of scruples. That is the stuff of fast-paced talk shows on state television. Russia has shown no mercy wherever it has passed. The problems have to do with the absence of prepared troopsthe quality and quantity of its weapons and strategic decisions, based more on pride and arrogance than on adaptation to each moment and each situation in the war.

Changing a general for another more brutal can cause great national applause and a certain fear abroad. It is normal. However, it does not look like it will have much influence on the course of the war itself. Russia must bet on precision in the attack on military infrastructures, everything that is spending weapons in exhibitions of unnecessary cruelty can only be understood and valued in terms of propaganda.