A month after the start of the invasion of Ukraine, Russia still does not seem to be out of the woods. On the ground, the army in Moscow has lost several of its generals and many other officers, which is likely to greatly affect operations – and shows how the art of war in Russia differs from that of the West .
In a war where even the figures of the dead on each side are of strategic interest, it is difficult to determine precisely the circumstances or the number of deaths of these high military officers. On Monday, a diplomatic source quoted in the specialist magazine Foreign Policy, counted at least five Russian generals killed in the past four weeks.
Ukraine has seven deaths of generals: Major General Vitaly Gerasimov (already involved in the Second War in Chechnya, Syria and Crimea), Major General Andrei Kolesnikov, Major General Andrei Sukhovetsky (who went through the war in Georgia), Major General Oleg Mityaev, Lieutenant General Andrei Mordvichev, as well as Chechen General Magomed Tushaev, whose death has been disputed several times by the Chechen authorities.
An army “not at all prepared”?
This Friday, kyiv added the name of General Yakov Rezantsev to its list, who died “in a bombing of the Chornobaivk airfield”. For its part, Russia has only confirmed the death of Andrei Sukhovetsky, although many local sources and independent media confirm other deaths cited by Ukraine.
Despite these imprecise figures, these losses are probably the largest since World War II for Russia. And they risk undermining the organization of the troops: Western intelligence estimates that 20 officers are deployed in Ukraine to manage the Russian soldiers. To these losses in the high ranks are added “dozens of colonels and other officers”, continues the chief Ukrainian negotiator Mykhaïlo Podolyak on Twitteraccording to him, “the Russian army is not prepared at all and is only fighting with numbers and cruise missiles.”
How to explain so many deaths of senior officers on the ground? For Michel Goya, a former naval officer, writer and military historian, these deaths counted at 1 general “for approximately 1,000 Russian dead” are difficult to interpret. Is it a “problem of command imposing a presence of the generals as close as possible to the line of contact (not a Russian habit)? », or an « effectiveness of Ukrainian targeting? “. “It is not clear how these generals were killed,” he comments. on Twitter.
Overly present superiors
The presence of these high-ranking leaders so close to the field raises questions. This organization is too centralized, judge several analysts. “Their level of management in small units is not very good, which is why we see general officers very up front in the field. The army is highly dependent on its superiors who control everything from the front, because they do not have a corps of non-commissioned officers who are sources of initiatives”, develops Colonel John Barranco, former Marines and member of the think tank Atlantic Council, with the Wall Street Journal.
“There are too many colonels, not enough corporals. In the West, tasks that require resolution at lower levels must go through the entire chain of command,” a Moscow-based diplomat told Reuters.
Elie Tenenbaum, a researcher at the French Institute for International Relations (IFRI), believes that the presence on the ground of officers of this level bears witness to the fact that Moscow “asks generals to be at the head of their troops and to take risks” to compensate for a difficult moral situation of the troops.
Communication problems
If the generals are so close to the field, it is also because of communication problems. “They are struggling to get their orders to the front line. They have to go there directly for everything to trigger, which makes them more vulnerable than usual, ”comments a diplomatic source with Foreign Policy.
In Kharkiv, in particular, two agents of the FSB, the Russian security service, complained of the destruction of secure communication channels within the army, making it even more difficult to transmit information – the latter moreover exchanged on the death of Major General Andrei Sukhovetsky in an unencrypted call, intercepted by Ukrainian forces, according to the Bellingcat investigative site. With these poorly protected communications, the Ukrainian forces, specifically trained to target senior military officers according to President Volodymyr Zelensky, could have an easier time destroying them.
Already faced with unexpected Ukrainian resistance, the Russian army could find it even more difficult to advance with so many disappearances of high-ranking leaders, difficult to replace immediately. The losses are still accumulating in number in the army: Russia recognized the death of 1,351 soldiers and 3,825 wounded this Friday, the Ukrainians advancing them the figure of 15,000 Russian dead. A NATO official estimated Wednesday at between 7,000 and 15,000 the number of Russian dead, out of a total of 200,000 soldiers deployed. Information is more limited for the Ukrainian camp: President Zelensky claimed, in mid-March, to have lost 1,300 soldiers, against 2,800 dead and 3,700 wounded claimed by Russia in early March.