Five Russian generals died in Ukraine in a month of war according to news released from Kiev. In the last few hours, according to leaked information, General Yakov Ryezantsev was killed in the Chornobaivka fighting, just north of Kherson, where intense clashes are taking place.
According to the news released by Ukraine, at least 5 Russian generals have fallen since the invasion that took place on 24 February. Before Ryezantsev, General Oleg Mityaev would have died, killed by the Azov battalion in the Mariupol area in recent days. The list would also include the names of Andrei Kolesnikov, Vitaly Gerasimov and Andrey Sukhovetsky. International analysts believe about 20 generals are conducting field operations for Russia. A quarter of these, according to not fully confirmed reports, would have been killed.
The presence of such high-ranking officers directly on the theater of operations can appear to be an anomaly. As the BBC pointed out, citing Western sources, the presence of generals could be a sign of the difficulties of coordinating operations in the field: the direct commitment of the generals would be necessary to ensure effectiveness. On the other hand, as the military analyst Konrad Muzyka observed to the British broadcaster, in the Russian armed forces it is not entirely unusual to see officers engaged in the management of ordinary and daily activities.
As the BBC highlighted, it cannot be ruled out that the Ukrainian strategy expressly provides for the elimination of prominent military figures in Moscow’s forces. The hypothesis was confirmed in recent days to the Wall Street Journal by a source defined close to the circles of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: Kiev would have used military intelligence resources to identify and hit the commanders of the Russian armed forces. The localization of the targets would also be favored by the ‘permeable’ communications of the Moscow forces: the use of normal mobile phones or analogue instruments offers an assist to the Ukrainian intelligence, which can easily intercept and locate. Thus, as Georgetown University analyst Rita Konaev observed, the elimination of the generals may not necessarily have occurred in battle: “They don’t necessarily have to be on the front line. They may have been traveling or inspecting lines. refueling, for example “.