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Russia has sacked the commander of its Eastern Military District, Colonel-General Alexander Chaiko, the Russian news site RBC reports – the latest reshuffle of top brass amid a string of battlefield reversals in Ukraine.
RBC cited publicly available state registers to report that Lieutenant-General Rustam Muradov had been appointed to head the Eastern Military District, which covers troops based in Russia’s far east although much of its strength is currently deployed in Ukraine.
Muradov, who was sanctioned by the European Union in February, previously served in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine and commanded Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh, a breakaway region of Azerbaijan inhabited mostly by ethnic Armenians.
Although the head of Muradov’s native Dagestan region congratulated him on his appointment, neither the Kremlin nor the defence ministry immediately confirmed the move.
On Monday, RBC reported that the commander of the Western military district, Colonel-General Alexander Zhuravlyov, had been replaced, shortly after dramatic Russian losses in northeast Ukraine last month and Ukraine’s recapture of the strategic hub of Lyman, in Donetsk region.
Since then, Russian forces have also lost control of several hundred square kilometres of Ukraine’s Kherson region – territory that officials in Moscow now consider part of Russia.
In September, the deputy defence minister in charge of logistics, General Dmitry Bulgakov, was replaced by Colonel General Mikhail Mizintsev, accused by the EU of orchestrating a siege of the Ukrainian port of Mariupol early in the war that killed thousands of civilians.
Russian President Vladimir Putin celebrated his 70th birthday on Friday with fawning praise from some officials but little public fuss.
In a clear repudiation of Putin’s record, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Russia’s most prominent human rights group, Memorial, which local authorities shut down over the past year.
A Ukrainian human rights group and a jailed campaigner against abuses by the government in Belarus also shared the award.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukraine’s forces were swiftly recapturing more territory, including more than 500 square kilometres in the south where they burst through a second major front this week.
US President Joe Biden said the prospect of defeat could make Putin desperate enough to use nuclear weapons, the biggest risk since US president John Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev faced off over missiles in Cuba in 1962.
“We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis,” Biden said in New York.
Putin was “not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons, because his military is, you might say, is significantly underperforming,” Biden said.
In Geneva, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a motion to appoint an independent expert on human rights abuse allegations in Russia, accusing the government of creating a “climate of fear” through repression and violence.
It was the first time the body had set up a “special rapporteur” to examine the record of one of a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council.
Russia said it showed the US and its allies were using the UN for political ends.
Putin was shown on state television meeting leaders of other ex-Soviet allies at an informal summit in St Petersburg on Friday but commentators mentioned his birthday only in passing.
Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, a vocal supporter of the war, led birthday tributes for Putin with a prayer for God to “grant him health and longevity, and deliver him from all the resistances of visible and invisible enemies”.
In keeping with the sombre atmosphere, St Petersburg city council said it was cancelling traditional New Year and Christmas festivities this year and using the money to pay for “additional equipment and equipment for volunteers and those who have been mobilised”.
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