Valery Gerasimov News

Sergei Shoigu ordered more, and swifter, delivery of weapons for Moscow's military operation in Ukraine, the Russian defence ministry said on Wednesday. Russia, which calls its war in Ukraine a special military operation, now controls just under a fifth of Ukraine's territory, the bulk seized during the first months of the war it launched in February 2022. At a meeting with the top military command for Moscow's fight in Ukraine, the chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov, who is in charge of the operation, delivered a report to Shoigu, the ministry said on the Telegram messaging app.

Sergei Surovikin, nicknamed "General Armageddon", as head of the air force after he vanished from public view during a Wagner mercenary mutiny against the top army brass, two Russian news outlets reported on Wednesday. A recipient of Russia's top military award, Surovikin is the most senior Russian military figure to lose his job over the June 23-34 mutiny, which President Vladimir Putin said could have tipped Russia into civil war. Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, who spearheaded the revolt, remains free and on Monday posted a video address which he suggested was shot in Africa. The two men Prigozhin had wanted to topple — Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasimov, chief of general staff — remain in their posts. Once commander of Russia's overall war effort in Ukraine when he was lauded by Russian and Western military experts as one of its most effective operators, Surovikin has not yet been publicly fired. However, Russian state news agency RIA cited an unnamed but «informed» source as saying: «Ex-chief of the Russian Air and Space Forces Sergei Surovikin has now been relieved of his post, while Colonel-General Viktor Afzalov, head of the main staff of the Air Force, is temporarily acting as commander-in-chief of the Air Force».

MOSCOW (Reuters) — Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin was listed as a passenger on a private jet which crashed on Wednesday evening north of Moscow with no survivors, the Russian authorities said.

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko. Putin agreed to allow the Wagner founder and his men to move to Belarus and to drop criminal cases of armed mutiny against them.

Ukraine said on Thursday its troops were holding out despite heavy fighting on a battlefield littered with bodies around a salt mining town in eastern Ukraine, where Russian mercenaries have claimed Moscow's first significant gain in half a year.