AS THE RUSSIAN 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. Now, as Russia abandons its assault 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 The Economist 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.

That led to a career-making posting. In 2015 General Dvornikov became the first commander of Russia’s military campaign in support of Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s dictator. The idea of a small but decisive projection of military power a long way beyond the country’s borders, using air, ground and naval forces, was a novelty for Russia. “The Syrian armed forces had completely exhausted themselves, the personnel were demoralised [and] the officer corps was degraded,” recalled General Dvornikov, years later. Russian involvement “radically changed the situation”.

His success in turning the situation around and rescuing Mr Assad’s regime earned him the Kremlin’s approbation: in 2016 he was made a Hero of the Russian Federation, the country’s highest honour. He also bagged an appointment as commander of the Southern military district. The district is small, but strategic: it abuts Donbas, where Russian forces and their proxies have fought Ukraine since 2014, and where the next phase of the current war is likely to play out. It was this command, and his consequent knowledge of the area, that probably led to his appointment as the point man for Ukraine.

That command also put him on a British sanctions list: he is alleged to have overseen air support for a Russian attack on Ukrainian naval vessels in 2018, which helped Russia consolidate its occupation of Crimea. More troubling still was the conduct of the forces he commanded in Syria. During his first three months in charge, Russian air strikes were estimated to have killed almost 700 members of Islamic State, a jihadist group—but almost 800 civilians, too. Human-rights bodies accuse Russia of using cluster munitions in built-up areas and deliberately striking hospitals around Aleppo, a rebel-held city. In 2020 Human Rights Watch, an NGO, cited General Dvornikov’s Hero of the Russian Federation award as evidence of the “lack of accountability” in Russia’s war.

Heavy civilian casualties were an inevitable byproduct of the strategy General Dvornikov adopted in Syria. In an article published in 2018, he pointed to the difficulty of fighting in mountains, in tunnels under cities and night operations. Firepower was key, he said: air strikes, missiles fired from warships, artillery and, in Aleppo, “constant fire…day and night, without a break”. Psychological warfare was important, too: “without information operations, we would not have been successful in Aleppo, Deir ez-Zor and Ghouta,” said General Dvornikov, referring to urban areas that were all but levelled.

Ironically, given Russia’s woes in Ukraine, the paramount lesson was the importance of unified command. General Dvornikov ran the war from Russia’s headquarters in Khmeimim, an airbase in western Syria, with 15-20 staff. Khmeimim “linked all the elements into a single reconnaissance and strike” system, he noted later. Commanders could talk to one another by video link. Naval officers could co-ordinate strikes by aircraft-carriers against ground targets. Decisions were made quickly.

General Dvornikov is not the only one with this experience. Almost every senior Russian officer has spent time in Syria. Alexander Zhuravlyov and Alexander Chayko, the generals who command Russia’s Western and Eastern military districts respectively, have both commanded Syrian operations twice and have spent longer there than General Dvornikov, notes Rob Lee of King’s College London. But General Dvornikov is “very thoughtful” and “listens to others, contrary to many Russian generals of his rank and generation”, says a source who has met him. He is said to have impressed German officials during a visit to the country some years ago.

A capacity to learn will be vital for Russia’s armed forces. “The Kremlin identifies Syria as a highly successful—and replicable—operation,” concluded a study published by the Institute for the Study of War, a think-tank, last year. That it was not replicated in Ukraine is probably down to several pathologies: the secrecy with which the Kremlin planned the war, faulty intelligence about Ukraine’s fragility and its will to resist, and the vastly bigger scale of the operation.

Yet the fragmented command structure will have played a role, too. “There is an expectation that their operations will be far better co-ordinated than they were previously,” says the Western official. “We are yet to see evidence of that in terms of what they’re doing, but…we would expect command and control to improve.” General Dvornikov cannot fix everything—morale remains low, officials say, with some Russian units refusing to fight, and manpower is still an issue too—but the coming weeks will show whether he can get the Russian war machine back on track. ■

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