WHO IS "GENERAL ARMAGEDDON"?

Today, Russian media told the world that in the war with Ukraine, they are willing to “kill 1 million, 5 million... we can exterminate all of you.” And they used the word “exterminate.”

At the same time, Ukraine underwent a second straight day of Russian aerial bombardment in which critical civilian infrastructure was targeted all over the country. Russian missiles slammed into electric power and water plants, and also into playgrounds and universities. Kremlin propagandists told their Russian viewers that the strikes were aimed at military targets, but there wasn’t even a pretense and the ululating Telegram channels of the nationalist hardliners saying things like the opener here demonstrated that.

Vladimir Putin continues to describe the attacks as retaliation for the explosion that partially demolished his bridge across the Kerch Strait connecting the Crimean peninsula to the Russian mainland.

Putin put a lot of stock in that bridge. As a man who thinks often about his historical legacy, he took great pride in being able to say he was able to accomplish a great feat of engineering, crossing a sea that Nicholas II and Josef Stalin had attempted, but failed, to conquer.

And so, we can imagine the agony the Yard Punk felt on being informed in the early hours of October 8, that his bridge had been engulfed in a massive fireball that completely destroyed one of the two sections that carried automotive traffic, and damaged several kilometers of railway track. Whoever planned the bombing just missed his 70th birthday by a few hours. A report later surfaced that the driver of the eighteen-wheeler carrying the explosives onto the bridge was set to detonate them earlier, on Putin’s birthday jubilee, had stopped to take a nap.

It took the Yard Punk 36 hours to respond. On Sunday, cruise missiles and other rockets were launched at every major city in Ukraine, hitting targets in Kyiv, the capital, to Lviv, in the far west.

This is a clear campaign of terror, and many close observers see the fingerprints of one man: General Sergei Surovikin.

Tall and stocky with a shaved pate and an arched brow, Surovikin looks like a more menacing version of Mike Myers’ Dr. Evil. He was put in command of the “special military operation” the day of the bridge calamity, October 8, which was no coincidence.

The news was hailed by hardliners from Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov to television host and propaganda harpy Olga Skabeeva, who reminded everyone that Surovikin’s last name had its roots in the word “surovy,” meaning harsh or severe, and that his nickname is “General Armageddon.”

A little background on this thug masquerading as a soldier: Surovikin got his start as a Spetsnaz (special forces) officer in the final years of the Soviet Union’s doomed invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Following return to the Soviet Union as Glasnost was beginning, he began accumulating clouds of dark stories that have followed his ascent through the ranks of the Russian military, unlike the reputations of other top Russian commanders, like General Valery Gerasimov.

On August 18, 1991, the GKChP, or the Government Committee on the State of Emergency, led by KGB hardliners, took Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev prisoner in his Crimean dacha and announced they had staged a coup to prevent the U.S.S.R. from sliding further down Gorbachev’s liberal path into oblivion.

In Moscow, protestors, mostly young liberals led by Boris Yeltsin, immediately gathered around the city’s White House, the seat of the young Soviet parliament, to defend it. The coup plotters ordered tanks into the city, which headed to the parliament building.

A tense standoff ensued but the coup plotters lost their nerve, as did the soldiers manning the tanks, who immediately fraternized with the people. Surovikin, no longer a Spetsnaz but now a young tank captain, wasthe only representative of the GKChP who tried to stop the protests through violence. He was one of the only people who took GKChP orders seriously. By the third day of the putsch, when protestors had relaxed into the realization that no one was going to shoot them, Surovikin had still not abandoned his orders.

He and his tanks made it to one of the tunnels leading to the White House. He ordered the protestors to disperse and, when they didn’t, he fired live ammunition and plowed his tank forward. Three young men were killed, one of them crushed to death under the treads. They were the only casualties of the failed coup.

No wonder Surovikin is a favorite of a leader who considers the fall of the Soviet Union the greatest catastrophe of the 20th Century.

Surovikin served a few months in jail for the incident but was released on Yeltsin’s personal orders, deciding he was just a young man carrying out orders and promoting him to major.

In 1995, Surovikin was accused of selling weapons and military equipment on the black market. Surovikin argued he had been framed. He was found guilty on three charges and given one year’s probation.

In March 2004, Major General Surovikin, then serving in Ekaterinburg, beat up an officer for voting the “wrong way” in the election. A few months later, Surovikin, known for being a harsh disciplinarian who was not above hitting his inferiors, reportedly dressed down a subordinate so harshly the man pulled out his sidearm and shot himself in the head, right there in the headquarters.

That same year Surovikin was deployed to Chechnya to fight Putin’s war on terror. Allegations of human rights violations quickly followed after Surovikin vowed to kill three Chechens for every dead Russian soldier. Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights organization (which was just awarded the Nobel Peace Prize) accused his unit of torture, disappearances, and at least one murder.

Surovikin earned the nickname “General Armageddon” in Syria in 2015. Russia provided air support to the barbaric war Syrian and Iranian forces were waging against the Syrian opposition and population. This involved bombing schools, hospitals, aid convoys, and other obviously civilian targets from the air. Surovikin was the top Russian commander in Syria.

According to Hassan Hassan, the founder and editor-in-chief of New Lines Magazine and a leading authority on Syria, Surovikin was “Assad’s favorite general.” A Human Rights Watch report lists Surovikin as one of the Syrian and Russian civilian and military commanders who may bear command responsibility for violations during the 2019-2020 Idlib offensive, during which, among other events, sarin gas was dropped on civilians from the air. When victims were taken to a nearby hospital for treatment, Russian planes bombed that, too.

Hassan says now that “people credit him with more than he deserves. The brutality is there, but his appointment (in Ukraine) is more of a PR stunt, an optical move, a way to say that worse is coming.”

Surovikin’s appointment has finally appeased the party of war baying on Putin’s right flank. “Putin’s chef” Evgeny Prigozhin, owner of private military contractor company Wagner, praised the move, calling Surovikin “a legendary individual who was born to faithfully serve the Motherland.” To get a sense of what it means when Prigozhin praises someone, consider that Prigozhin has gone to Russian prisons to personally recruit Russian convicts to fight for Wagner in Ukraine. In a leaked video he is seen telling a group of convicts that his first choice is killers, bragging that, in battle, his men descend into Ukrainian trenches and “cut out” Ukrainian soldiers with knives.

In hailing Surovikin’s appointment, the career highlight Prigozhin chose to accent was the one from 1991, when Surovikin crushed a young liberal under his tank. In his Telegram post, Prigozhin admits that he was there, on the side of the protestors, not realizing that they were all just American puppets, dismantling the great USSR. Prigozhin wrote that Surovikin “is that officer who, without thinking, when he got his order, got in his tank, and threw himself into the work of saving his country.”

Other than appeasing the local psychopaths like Kadyrov and Prigozhin, what does Surovikin’s appointment actually do?

Not much, argue military observers. The war is going very badly for Moscow. Even as missiles rained on Kyiv, Jeremy Fleming, the head of Britain’s GCHQ spy agency, made a rare public statement that Ukraine had succeeded in turning the tide of the war and that Russia’s military was “exhausted.” Within the first two weeks of Putin’s “partial mobilization,” more than 700,000 Russian men have fled the country. In Moscow, officials are giving draft notices to business owners to give to their employees because they can’t find people at home. There are reports of recruiting officers drafting homeless people out of shelters.

Surovikin, no matter his reputation, can’t change all that. It’s not like the Russians find a way to deal with HIMARS because he’s been appointed. In fact, this is probably not a great career move for Surovikin, who was on the short list for the chief of the general staff, given what has happened to his predecessors. The challenge anyone has is that the problems in the Russian military are structural - manpower, materiel, and the overall quality of the force. Changing the commander doesn’t change any of that.

The brutal bombing campaign against the Ukrainian civilian infrastructure is the decision of Putin, who is enraged by the destruction of “his” bridge and the course of the war. The strikes are clearly designed to shatter any sense of normalcy in Ukraine, which was starting to adjust to a war that was concentrated in the east and south. Kyiv hadn’t been bombed since June and has been returning to something resembling real, bustling city life.

The attacks are also intended to make this coming winter a hard one, taking out electricity and water supplies all over Ukraine. A convenient byproduct is that Ukraine has been forced to announce it is stopping energy exports to Europe so it can see to its own needs first. Through all the war, Russian gas was still flowing through pipelines across Ukrainian territory to Europe, largely unimpeded. Now, in a nice twofer for Moscow, the strikes harm Ukraine and deepen Europe’s energy crisis.

All of this is now intended to drag out the war, because Putin hopes he can outlast and out-suffer his opponents, that he wins by being the last man standing atop a pile of rubble.

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