Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is under new management

invasion of Ukraine stalled in February and March, Western officials scoured the intelligence to work out who was in charge. No one, it seemed. Russia had attacked Ukraine from several axes in the north, east and south. Each of those forces was fighting—and in some cases, losing—its own war. As Russia on Kyiv for now and focuses instead on the Donbas region and the rest of eastern Ukraine, it is learning from its mistakes. On April 8th a Western official told and other news organisations that General Alexander Dvornikov, commander of Russia’s southern military district, had been put in charge of operations in Ukraine. Who is he? General Dvornikov was born in Ussuriysk, a city near the Chinese border in Russia’s far east, in 1961. He graduated from the local military school as a teenager and rose through the ranks in what was then called Russia’s Far Eastern military district, whose main task was to guard against Chinese attack. Like Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, he served in East Germany, leaving with the last Russian forces in 1994. He also fought in the exceptionally brutal second Chechen war at the turn of the millennium. “He accomplished everything smoothly and with hard work, was never anyone’s protégé and moved up the ranks with great difficulty,” a military source told Russian state media in 2016. He was later appointed deputy commander of the Eastern district and then chief of staff of the Central one, which has responsibility for Central Asia.