The Ukrainian army in the port city of Odessa has yet again reported the death of a Russian colonel. Alexey Sharov is said to have been killed in the siege of Mariupol. As a result, the death toll among senior Russian officers continues to rise. “It has probably been since the Second World War that so many generals were killed in the Russian army,” writes the well-informed American magazine ‘Foreign Policy’.
Sharov belonged to the 810th Separate Guards Marine Brigade, part of the Russian Fleet in the Black Sea. It took part in several major Russian operations and wars, including in Georgia in 2008 and Syria. He would be the fifth colonel to have died at the front in Ukraine.
Several generals have also been killed. A European diplomat familiar with Western intelligence on Monday spoke of at least five since the war started in Ukraine. A top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky – Mykhailo Podoliak – stated on Sunday that there were already six. He also called the Russian troops “completely unprepared”.
sniper
Russia itself officially keeps it at one: Major General Andrey Sukhovetsky (47). President Vladimir Putin himself confirmed the death. The man was a veteran of the wars in Chechnya and Georgia and the annexation of Crimea into Ukraine in 2014. He was killed by a sniper near Hostomel.
The reason for the high death toll among Russian officers is said to be partly due to the faltering electronic communication material and the lack of discipline among the young and inexperienced troops. As a result, the officers have no choice but to direct their troops from the front. And there they are vulnerable.
Major General Vitaly Gerasimov (44) experienced that one tactical mistake can be fatal. He was killed just outside Kharkiv early this month after Ukrainian intelligence services overheard a conversation he was having on an unsecured mobile device after his secure Russian communications equipment failed. A drone then ended his life.
According to the European diplomat who spoke ‘Foreign Policy’, a fifth of all generals at the front in Ukraine would have been eliminated by now. This is, of course, a heavy blow to the Russian army.
But the death toll is also rising among the regular troops. The numbers vary widely, depending on the source from which they come. The Russians themselves speak in their most recent official figure of 498 fallen soldiers, but that dates back to March 2. On Monday, the Russian newspaper ‘Komsomolskaya Pravda’ – which follows the Kremlin’s discourse – reported that 9,861 Russian soldiers had already been killed and 16,153 injured since the start of the war in Ukraine, but those figures were quickly taken offline. It is not clear what the intention was. Were the numbers wrong? Was it a leak or a hack? Nobody knows.
Estimation
The most recent estimate by the Ukrainian authorities is from this morning and puts it at 15,600 soldiers killed. Cautious estimates by US intelligence and Defense a week ago pointed to more than 7,000 deaths among the Russian military.
The war in Ukraine is the largest deployment of Russian troops since the fall of the Soviet Union more than thirty years ago. It is estimated that there are between 150,000 and 200,000 men on the site. By comparison, fewer than 100,000 soldiers were deployed during the two wars in Chechnya and even fewer during the operations in Georgia and Ukraine in 2014.
Read everything about the war in Ukraine in this file.
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