Published: 09:05 BST, 27 June 2022 | Updated: 10:44 BST, 27 June 2022

When General Alexander Dvornikov was made overall commander of Russia’s forces in April, it looked as if the amateurishness and incoordination of the early stage of the Ukraine war might be being addressed. Now, though, Dvornikov is not around, and a new commander may shape a savage new phase of operations.

In recent days, the Russian defence ministry announced that Colonel General Alexander Lapin was in command of the Central Group of Forces in Ukraine, while General Sergei Surovikin was heading the Southern Group of Forces during the invasion. Of Dvornikov, who has not been seen for weeks, there was no mention, and the British Ministry of Defence suggests
he has been removed from his post.

Lapin has been commander of the Central Military District since 2017 and is considered a safe pair of hands. The arrival of Surovikin, though, was a surprise given that he was previously head of the VKS, the Russian’s combined air and air defence forces. He is no airman. Until 2017, Surovikin served in the Ground Forces, fighting in the Soviet war in Afghanistan, Russia’s military intervention into the Tajikistan civil war, and then the Second Chechen War, where he was wounded in action. He has a reputation for extreme toughness: in 2004, one of his subordinates shot himself in Surovikin’s office after he had been chewed out.

Surovikin has had a rather chequered past. He spent seven months in custody after the hard-line 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, as three protesters died when Surovikin forced his way through them. Then in 1995, he was convicted of having stolen and sold a service sidearm, although the charge was later quashed.

Nonetheless, he is also one of the most able officers of his generation, with a reputation as a problem-solver. He spent a tour between 2008-10 in charge of the General Staff’s Main Operations Directorate, its main planning and coordination department, which is often the mark of a high-flier tipped for the top. Then, in 2012, Surovikin was tasked with setting up the new Military Police (until then, Russia had lacked such a service).

In 2017, he was put in charge of Russia’s Group of Forces in Syria, for which he was awarded the Hero of Russia medal, and then on his return to Russia made commander of the VKS. This was a very unusual choice, but reflected a desire to see aerospace and ground forces coordinate better. There was a sense that Surovikin could break old habits and force the air forces to think more imaginatively about the future of air warfare.

His unprecedented second tour heading forces in Syria in 2019 made him a man to watch, possibly even a future Chief of the General Staff.

The current incumbent, General Valery Gerasimov is the longest-serving Chief of the General Staff in post-Soviet times, and there were hints that retirement was looming until the invasion. Now, Putin seems to fear the destabilising effect of reshuffles at the top of the system, but is certainly willing to shuffle through his generals. Colonel General Andrei Serdyukov, head of Russia’s airborne troops, has apparently been replaced
by Colonel General Mikhail Teplinsky, Lapin’s former chief of staff, for example.

Over-heated headlines notwithstanding, this is not a ‘purge’ nor a sign of dysfunction or despair, but rather an attempt to identify which officers are best suited to the unexpectedly tough fight in which Russia has become embroiled in Ukraine.

As a result, while the overall strategy is not going to change, the tactics may. Surovikin is likely to want to re-emphasise airpower, but also may well be willing to up the ante to maintain Russia’s current advance. Above all, the 55-year-old is arguably a more plausible successor to Gerasimov. He has more to prove and more to lose, and a track record of ruthlessness, even by the standards of his peers.

He will therefore presumably want to make the best of the campaign season, drawing on his own harsh lessons from Chechnya and Syria. The summer could get still hotter in the Donbas.

Surovikin has had a rather chequered past

SCHLOSS ELMAU, Germany, June 26 (Reuters) – Panned by critics for dragging his feet on Ukraine, called a “sulky liver sausage” by the Ukrainian ambassador, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Sunday won public praise from a man he has long privately admired: U.S. President Joe Biden.

Reaching over to touch Scholz’s arm as they sat at the start of a G7 meeting in the Bavarian Alps, Biden said it was “in no small part because of you” that the West had stuck together against Russia four months after the invasion of Ukraine.

The two men, who are from different political generations but both took office last year, have made common cause over Ukraine as they sought to heal ties that were sorely strained under Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump.

Both leaders have vowed to strengthen Ukraine’s armed forces, increase sanctions pressure on Moscow and counter surging food and energy prices that have undermined their popularity at home and tested their own domestic alliances.

At Sunday’s meeting, Biden pushed back against criticism of Scholz’s leadership, praising the chancellor for marshalling Europe’s response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. read more

“They are kindred spirits and they’re dealing with some of the same challenges,” said Steven Sokol, president of the American Council on Germany. “I could easily imagine there’s a bit of a bromance going on,” he said.

While privately expressing reservations about some other leaders, the 64-year-old Scholz speaks especially warmly of the U.S. president and sees the transatlantic relationship as a crucial pillar of German and European security.

He “has always looked very much to the USA,” according to one long-time friend and confidante.

The Social Democrat Scholz also values what he sees as Biden’s commitment to fighting for those left behind by globalisation and technological advances, a theme Scholz explored at length in his book “Land of Hope” in 2017.

KEEPING PROMISES

For his part, Biden, 79, has lauded Germany for agreeing to boost its military spending by 100 million euros over the next decade, and overcoming resistance stemming from World War Two on providing weapons to Ukraine.

Berlin’s support for repeated rounds of sanctions against Russia, often against its own economic interests, has impressed U.S. officials who had braced for a more halting embrace.

Germany was “one of the countries where we wanted to really restore and rebuild the trust and the solidarity in that relationship and I think we’ve really been able to achieve that,” a senior U.S. administration official said.

“The warm and friendly words between the two, the president’s expression of trust in Scholz showed that we’ve been able to make progress on that goal, and achieve a lot of that close working relationship that we wanted.”

Biden’s administration has also welcomed Scholz’s rapid and unprompted decision to halt the Russian-led Nord Stream 2 pipeline, said one source familiar with the matter.

“Scholz had promised the president that if Russia further invaded Ukraine, the pipeline would be shut down,” the source said. “He did exactly what he said he would do, and that was deeply appreciated.”

The Trump years contrasted to the warm relationship that Scholz’s predecessor Angela Merkel forged with Barack Obama after initial friction from disclosures that the National Security Agency had tapped Merkel’s mobile phone.

Trump’s public and private pummeling of Berlin over the pipeline, its failure to raise military spending to meet NATO targets and its support of the Iran nuclear deal sent the partnership reeling.

Biden first met Scholz in Rome at the Group of 20 meeting in October, shortly before the German leader took office.

“Relations between the two administrations are unusually close”, said one German government source. “In fact – the higher you get in the hierarchy in Washington, the closer relations are to German government.”

There have been differences, to be sure, including lingering frustration in Berlin and other European capitals over the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last August, a move seen as a “big mistake” that may have even encouraged Putin, according to German government sources.

Some in Washington meanwhile question Germany’s continued strong economic ties with China, echoing criticisms under Trump.

But on Sunday, Scholz was all smiles after Biden’s warm words: “It’s a good message that we all managed to stay united, which, obviously, Putin never expected.”

Reporting by Andrea Shalal and Andreas Rinke; editing by Matthias Williams and Raissa Kasolowsky

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

A Russian hacking group may be responsible for a cyber attack against a liquefied natural gas plant in Texas that led to its explosion on June 8.

The explosion took place at the Freeport Liquefied Natural Gas (Freeport LNG) liquefaction plant and export terminal on Texas’ Quintana Island. The June 8 incident will have a lasting impact on Freeport LNG’s operations.

Preliminary investigations suggested that the incident resulted from the overpressure and rupture of a segment of an LNG transfer line, leading to the rapid flashing of LNG and the release and ignition of the natural gas vapor cloud.

At this time it is not clear why the safety mechanisms in place did not prevent the explosion. Experts speculate a cyber attack may have turned off the industrial safety controls at the natural gas facility.

ICS malware like TRITON, which experts associated with Russia-linked APT group XENOTIME, has offensive capabilities to shut down industrial safety controls and cause extensive damages to industrial facilities.

“On March 24 the U.S. Department of Justice brought charges against four Russian nationals suspected of using TRITON malware in cyber attacks on behalf of the Russian government between 2012 and 2018. That same day, the FBI issued an advisory warning that TRITON malware tools still remain a major threat to industrial systems around the world.” reported the American Military News website.

The Washington Times national security writer Tom Rogan confirmed that the explosion at the Freeport LNG facility could be consistent with a hacking campaign conducted by APT groups like XENOTIME.

Rogan added that the company does have in place the Operation Technology/Industrial Control Systems network detection systems.

At this time, Freeport LNG denied the theory that sees a cyber attack as the root cause of the incident.

“Unless Freeport LNG has OT/ICS network detection systems deployed appropriately and has completed a forensics investigation, a cyberattack cannot be ruled out,” Rogan wrote.

“Two more sources who spoke with Rogan said that around the time of Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, a cyber unit of Russia’s GRU military intelligence service conducted targeting-reconnaissance operations against Freeport LNG.” continues the American Military News website.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, liquefied natural gas plant)

This article links to a state controlled Russian media. Read more.

Twitter has been hiring “an alarming number” of ex-FBI agents and other former “feds and spies,” news outlet MintPress News is reporting, after conducting an analysis of employment and recruitment websites.

According to the research, in recent years the company employed “dozens of individuals from the national security state to work in the fields of security, trust, safety and content.”

“Chief amongst these is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI is generally known as a domestic security and intelligence force. However, it has recently expanded its remit into cyberspace,” MintPress wrote.

It provides several examples of such appointments. FBI veteran Karen Walsh who, according to her Twitter profile, served as a special agent for 21 years, has become a director of corporate resilience at the Silicon Valley-based company. Mark Jaroszewski, Twitter director of corporate security and risk, joined the Twitter team after 20+ years at the FBI.

The CIA and NATO-aligned lobby group the Atlantic Council have also been named by MintPress as key incubators of personnel for Twitter.

“Twitter also directly employs active army officers. In 2019, Gordon Macmillan, the head of editorial for the entire Europe, Middle East and Africa region was revealed to be an officer in the British Army’s notorious 77th Brigade – a unit dedicated to online warfare and psychological operations. This bombshell news was steadfastly ignored across the media,” the outlet stressed.

RT has checked open-access social media accounts of Twitter’s top managers and also discovered some former employees of the security services among them – in addition to the ones mentioned in the MintPress investigation.

MintPress News stresses that while Twitter’s HR policy might appear logical – the company hires specialists in the areas it needs – it creates some serious problems, not only for the company, but also for the security agencies and organizations. According to former FBI agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley, who is quoted by MintPress, many agents have one eye on post-retirement jobs.

“The truth is that at the FBI 50% of all the normal conversations that people had were about how you were going to make money after retirement,” Rowley said.

MintPress claimed that the fact that Twitter recruits largely from the US national security organizations undermines the company’s claims about its neutrality, as the US government “is the source of some of the largest and most extensive influence operations in the world.”

Another risk is that “the company will start to view every problem in the same manner as the U.S. government does – and act accordingly,” the outlet states. To prove this claim, the website analyzed a list – compiled by Twitter – of the countries allegedly conducting disinformation campaigns.

“One cannot help noticing that this list correlates quite closely to a hit list of U.S. government adversaries. All countries carry out disinfo campaigns to a certain extent. But these ‘former’ spooks and feds are unlikely to point the finger at their former colleagues or sister organizations or investigate their operations,” MintPress explained.

Twitter adds warning messages to the tweets and accounts of the state-affiliated media of Russia, China, Iran and Cuba, thus mirroring “US hostility” towards these countries, but does not add any warnings to the pages of state-affiliated media of US and its allies, the outlet highlighted.

Ultimately, MintPress found that Twitter is not the only social media platform that’s “cultivating such an intimate relationship with the FBI and other groups belonging to the secret state.”

“Facebook, for example, has entered into a formal partnership with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, whereby the latter holds significant influence over 2.9 billion users’ news feeds, helping to decide what content to promote and what content to suppress,” it said, adding that the company has also employed former NATO Press Secretary Ben Nimmo as its head of intelligence.

TikTok, according to the outlet, has been “filling its organization with alumni of the Atlantic Council, NATO, the CIA and the State Department.”

Reddit and various media, including Thomson Reuters and multiple US TV channels have also been actively employing former spies, MintPress News claims.

“One of media’s primary functions is to serve as a fourth estate; a force that works to hold the government and its agencies to account. Yet instead of doing that, increasingly it is collaborating with them. Such are these increasing interlocking connections that it is becoming increasingly difficult to see where big government ends and big media begins,” it pointed out.