A new change at the head of the Russian army, this time at the level of its fleet. We knew that Commander Nikolai Evmenov, at the head of the Russian navy since 2019, was almost out of the running after Ukraine’s numerous successes in the Black Sea. On March 10, Russian media even claimed, citing anonymous sources, that he had been dismissed from his post by President Vladimir Putin and replaced by Admiral Alexander Moiseyev. The Kremlin then refused to comment on the subject, without denying this information.
This Tuesday, March 19, Alexander Moiseyev was officially presented as the “acting” command of the Russian navy during a ceremony with submarine crews in the port of Kronstadt (northwest), the agencies reported of TASS and Ria Novosti.
According to his biography on the Ministry of Defense website, Alexander Moiseyev, 61, a trained submariner, has led the Northern Fleet since 2019. His predecessor, Admiral Nikolai Evmenov, had commanded the entire Russian fleet for four years. Before that, this former submariner had also been the commander of the Northern Fleet.
The ordeal of the Russian army in the Black Sea
Unlike the Russian land forces, which regained the initiative on the front in Ukraine, the Russian fleet had to retreat to the Black Sea in the face of multiple attacks from maritime surface drones as well as long-range missiles from the Kiev army. These successes allowed the Ukrainian army to sink or damage numerous Russian ships, even claiming in early February to have destroyed more than a third of the Russian fleet based in the Black Sea, while allowing the reopening of a maritime corridor to export its cereals. .
At the beginning of March, the Ukrainian navy, for example, claimed to have destroyed “the most modern Russian patrol boat, the ‘Sergueï Kotov'”, hit by maritime drones, near the Kerch Strait linking Crimea to Russia. Among other successes, Ukraine bombed the headquarters of the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol in Crimea in September 2023, and again, in spring 2022, at the start of the conflict, managed to sink the ‘Moskva’, the flagship of the Russian fleet.
“While they almost no longer have a navy, the Ukrainians have succeeded in making the Black Sea an extremely dangerous space for Russian forces,” summarized former admiral Pascal Ausseur, now director general, to L’Express. of the Mediterranean Foundation for Strategic Studies. “Thanks to their surface drones, they are capable of carrying the fight several hundred kilometers from the coast.” Enough to lead to a necessary change in Russian strategy, therefore.
Frequent upheavals
If the changes in the command of the Ukrainian army have been hotly discussed and commented on, notably with the replacement of the popular Valeri Zalouzhny by Oleksandr Syrsky at the head of the armed forces at the beginning of February, we cannot say that stability is the order of the day. side of the Russian general staff, far from it.
The latest change concerned the leadership of the Air Force, in August 2023. Commander Sergei Surovikin, nicknamed “General Armaggedon” for the brutality of his methods, had been officially ousted… the same day of the death of the former leader of the Wagner group Yevgeny Prigozhin, of whom he was one of the most faithful supporters within the Russian general staff.
Since the abortive revolt of Wagner’s forces in June 2023, this influential general had mysteriously disappeared from the public space, a sign of his downgrading and internal struggles within the Russian military command. Sourovikin finally reappeared for the first time last September, in Algeria, during an official Russian visit, in civilian clothes alongside officers in military uniform.
The mystery of the Russian chief of staff
But the position that has seen the most changes is undoubtedly that of the head of the offensive in Ukraine, officially called the commander of the “combined group of troops deployed in Ukraine”. At the beginning of 2023, Russian general Valery Guerassimov, also chief of staff of the Russian army, was appointed to replace… Sergei Surovikin, who was then experiencing his first demotion. Except that the latter had already replaced another general, Alexander Lapine, a few months earlier. A large-scale shambles, which demonstrated the Kremlin’s annoyance at the failure of the much-hoped-for lightning victory.
Since then, Gerassimov had managed to stabilize himself at the head of the offensive in Ukraine while retaining his position as chief of the general staff, notably for having defeated Kiev’s counter-offensive last summer. But in Russia, that’s clearly not enough to make things simple. Thus, the head of the Russian armed forces was at the heart of numerous rumors surrounding his disappearance, after not appearing in public throughout the beginning of 2024. Rumors then circulated announcing that he had been killed during Ukrainian air strikes. in Crimea on January 4, without the Kremlin confirming or denying this information.
It was enough for all the speculations to be stirred up. A video published by Moscow on February 22, however, showed him decorating soldiers while talking about the success of his troops in eastern Ukraine. Before images posted on social media showed him voting alongside Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in Russia’s presidential election last weekend. Clichés whose veracity must be questioned, and which above all, do not confirm whether Guerassimov still leads the Russian armed forces. At the military command in Moscow, we are beginning to understand: no one is really safe.