Another month, another Russian military reshuffle: Putin is replacing the general running the occupying forces in Ukraine as often as a Premier League club desperate for immediate success, Dan Sabbagh, analysis editor, writes in The Guardian..

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Obviously, such inconsistency indicates that the Kremlin is dissatisfied with the course of the war, but the decision to put the commander of the armed forces, General Valery Gerasimov, in charge of the invasion is also striking for other reasons..

General Sergei Surovikin was demoted to one of three deputies after only three months of work.. This raises the obvious question of whether there will be any change in strategy as the war (nearly a month away) approaches an overcast anniversary,” Sabbagh said..

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General Armageddon Surovikin: bombing experience in Syria.

Surovikin, the commander of the aerospace forces, earned the nickname "

(Recall what Aleppo looked like after the bombing of Assad's Russian-backed forces - ed..

And here is what, for example, Mariupol looked like:.

A grim similar attempt to bomb Ukraine's power grid during his rule appears to have failed, and the West is becoming more confident that Moscow lacks the guided missiles it needs to support its efforts..

Interestingly, some Russian military bloggers, most closely followed by Western experts, have been particularly cynical about the changes.. "

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Gerasimov is now more connected to the military.

Given Russia's Poor and Chaotic Military Results So Far, Bloggers Are Right. Gerasimov, as head of the army, has always been older than Surovikin, and therefore, in a certain sense, little has changed - although now this means that Gerasimov is more closely connected with military operations..

But even this is not as new as it seems at first glance.. At the end of April, Gerasimov went to the front line to personally control the breakthrough from Izyum, such was the dissatisfaction of the Kremlin with the work of the local command. The Ukrainians detected his presence and it is believed that he was wounded after the command post where he was based was bombed..

In any case, it is the Russian president who controls military strategy quite carefully and, according to Western intelligence, participates in decision-making at the level of brigades and even battalions.. But it also helps Ukraine a lot, experts say Putin's big plan is often opaque or incomprehensible..

Russia, says Ed Arnold of the Royal United Services Institute think tank, is suffering from a command and control disorder..

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At the beginning of the war, Arnold points out, many Russian soldiers were not told what their real mission was.. It is not clear what Russia's end game is now, as its forces clearly cannot conquer Ukraine or all of Donbass despite months of fighting in Bakhmut and neighboring Soledar.

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A more likely scenario is that the latest personnel reshuffle is political and comes just as Yevgeny Prigozhin's private military group Wagner seems to be finally gaining a foothold in Soledar.. As Prigozhin stated not very tactfully at the beginning of this week: “No one except Wagner participated in the storming of Soledar”.

The degeneration of Russian regular forces after almost 11 months of war is so high that the West estimates this week that the Wagner group makes up a quarter or more of Russian fighters in Ukraine..

Prigozhin and Surovikin are allies who many believe hope to usurp Gerasimov's Kremlin military establishment and his immediate superior, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

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Sir Lawrence Friedman, author of Command, on the politics of military operations, said: "

This suggests that Putin is trying to balance the tension between Wagner and the regular army, rather than develop any new military strategy..

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