Meet ‘General Armageddon’, the fearsome new commander of Russian forces in Ukraine | Explained News,The Indian Express
The brutal attacks on civilian targets in Kyiv and other places are being linked to the appointment of General Sergei Surovikin, a ruthless veteran of Russia’s wars in Chechnya and Syria.
The Kremlin on Saturday (October 8) announced the appointment of General Sergei Surovikin, a 55-year-old veteran of several intense and complex battles including as leader of the Russian forces in Syria, and a man with a reputation for ruthlessness and brutality.
A notorious record
His fearsome battlefield record had earned Surovikin nicknames such as the “fierce one” and “General Armageddon”, the ‘Financial Times’ said in a report. ‘The Guardian’ report described him as the “notorious general who opened fire on pro-democracy protesters in the 1990s”, and ‘The New York Times’ quoted a Human Rights Watch report from 2020 putting him among the military leaders who might have had “command responsibility” for human rights violations in Syria.
On February 23 this year, a day before Russian troops marched into Ukraine, Gen. Surovikin was put on a list of individuals sanctioned by the European Union, Western media reports said.
“Surovikin is like Marshal Zhukov,” the ‘Financial Times’ report quoted Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Moscow-based think tank Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, as saying. “He is a tough guy who knows how to run a war. He’s a real beast, not some dumb vodka-drinking guy or a pseudo-intellectual. He’s a real fighter who isn’t scared to tell the higher-ups the truth,” Pukhov told the ‘Financial Times’.
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