Independent Washington think tank, the Institute for the Study of War, in April said Zhidko was overseeing a number of operational direction commanders last year in an attempt to organise Russia’s offensive in eastern Ukraine.
His promotion earned him sanctions by the US State Department, with his name added to a list of 11 people identified as “key members of Russia’s defence enterprise”.
Colonel General Alexander Dvornikov, pictured with Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2016, was in charge of Moscow’s war in Ukraine for seven weeks before being dumped.Credit: AP
Zhidko had been promoted to replace Army General Alexander Dvornikov, who had failed to achieve “[Vladimir] Putin’s high expectations in the first months following the retreat from Kyiv,” the institute wrote in an April briefing.
“Zhidko likely inherited Dvornikov’s task of formalising Russian command structures in Ukraine and sought to introduce operational groupings of forces in an effort to succeed in the task that likely contributed to Dvornikov’s dismissal.”
However, he was ultimately removed from the role “for failures during military operations,” the BBC Russia reported. Zhidko was replaced by Sergey Surovikin, who himself is said to be under house arrest over his close links to Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the Wagner mercenary group.
Visitors walk past exhibits, including a Russian mobile Topol missile launching unit, at the international Army-2023 forum near Moscow on Friday.Credit: Reuters
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English translations of posts by an independent Russian Telegram channel earlier this week said Surovikin “cannot leave his home, but the other day he was allowed to see several subordinates”.
Zhidko is the second Russian general to die this week. Radio Free Europe earlier reported Gennady Lopyrev, who was in prison on bribery charges, had died of an unspecified sudden illness.
An ongoing collaboration between Mediazona, BBC and volunteers last month confirmed at least 284 high-ranking Russian officers, of lieutenant colonel rank and higher, had died since Russia’s illegal invasion.
A separate project between Mediazona, Meduza and a data scientist at Tübingen University, Germany, in July suggested nearly 50,000 Russian men have died in the war, while other estimates put the figure as high as 60,000 to 70,000 in the first year of the conflict.
General Sergei Surovikin has close ties to Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin.Credit: AP
The analysis by the media outlets probed Russian government inheritance records and official mortality data to apply a statistical method used widely during the COVID-19 pandemic to compute excess mortality.
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