# Valery Gerasimov **Valery Gerasimov** (born September 1955, Kazan) has been Chief of the Russian General Staff since November 9, 2012, and since January 2023 has also personally commanded Russia's forces in Ukraine. His name is attached to a "doctrine" that its own coiner has disowned. ## The "Gerasimov doctrine" On February 26, 2013 Gerasimov published an article in the military weekly *Voyenno-promyshlennyy Kur'yer* on the changing character of war. British analyst Mark Galeotti blogged about it, coining "Gerasimov doctrine" as what he called a placeholder. In a March 5, 2018 *Foreign Policy* essay titled "I'm Sorry for Creating the 'Gerasimov Doctrine,'" Galeotti wrote that it "doesn't exist": the article analyzed what Moscow saw as Western techniques (the Arab Spring, Ukraine's Maidan), not a Russian plan. See [[Gerasimov Doctrine]]. ## War command Gerasimov was sanctioned by the U.K. and EU in 2014 and by the U.S. on February 25, 2022. On January 11, 2023 he replaced [[Sergei Surovikin]] as overall commander of the joint force in Ukraine. The June 2023 [[Wagner Group]] mutiny led by [[Yevgeny Prigozhin]] was aimed at him and Defence Minister [[Sergei Shoigu]]. He turned 70 in September 2025; a 2021 law lets Putin keep senior officers past that age, and no removal had been reported. ## RWKB angle The "Gerasimov doctrine" label is a Western analytic shorthand that its author retracted; it should be cited with that caveat rather than as settled Russian strategy. ## See Also - [[Gerasimov Doctrine]] - [[Russo-Ukrainian War]]