THE WAR was nearly over, Yakov Rezantsev assured his troops on day four of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That was a month ago. On March 25th the lieutenant-general, commander of Russia’s 49th Combined Arms Army, was reportedly dead, killed in a strike near the city of Kherson. Ukrainian officials say he was the seventh Russian general to die in action in Ukraine; Western ones agree. Russia has not confirmed this, and the tally has not been independently verified. But it is clear that the country’s top brass are suffering unusual attrition. Why?
General officers—in most armies, those who rank higher than colonel or brigadier—typically command big formations, like divisions and corps. Those formations need to be run from large headquarters, which tend to remain out of artillery and rocket range and thus a greater distance from the frontlines. That usually puts generals in a safer position.
America lost nine generals in combat in Vietnam, though that was over 20 years rather than a few weeks, and most died when their helicopters were shot down. In the past two decades of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, just one American general died—and he was shot by an Afghan soldier. Even during its bloody occupation of Afghanistan in 1979-89, the Soviet Union is thought to have lost no more than six generals in the first six months of war.
You have to go back 80 years to find a remotely comparable attrition of senior officers. During the second world war around 235 Soviet generals were killed in combat, according to “Fallen Soviet Generals”, a book by Aleksander Maslov (over 200 more died in other ways). Even then, during the worst period—from June 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, to November 1942, when the Red Army encircled the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad—an average of just under six generals were killed per month, about the same as the current toll.
One reason for the high death rate today is that Russia has botched many of its advances, particularly in northern Ukraine. Many Russian units have shown themselves incapable of modern combined-arms warfare, as tanks have ventured forward without artillery support. Morale has been low, logistics poor and casualties high. And that seems to have forced the generals to get their boots muddy. In most professional armies, a cadre of long-serving, senior enlisted personnel known as non-commissioned officers (NCOs) supervise troops and often take over leadership of smaller units in wartime. NCOs are the “backbone of NATO”, says one of the alliance’s officers. Russia’s army lacks a comparable layer of leadership. That may have forced more senior officers to go forward, to see the situation for themselves and stamp their authority on their subordinate commanders.
That is not inherently bad—a good commander needs to get a feel for the front. The bigger problem may be that these adventurous generals have sloppy security. Russian forces have modern Azart encrypted radios, but these seem to be too few in number—possibly because of corruption—according to a report by the Royal United Services Institute, a British think-tank. So Russian soldiers have been resorting to unencrypted radio and ordinary mobile phones.
Not only can these communications be intercepted, but their source can also be located by electronic-warfare or cyber means. Russia used that technique to good effect against Ukrainian forces in Donbas after 2014; now Ukraine is turning it on Russians, using snipers to pick off senior officers or artillery to bombard their position.
Some insiders suggest that Western intelligence agencies and armed forces may be helping Ukraine to locate Russian troops (although Western officials refuse to be drawn on the subject). Former American intelligence officials told the Yahoo News website that the CIA had spent years training Ukrainian paramilitaries, including snipers: “I think we’re seeing a big impact from snipers…the training really paid off.”
The loss of so many generals in this way is embarrassing to the Russian army, epitomising its tactical failures in the first month of war. Several commanders have been dismissed. Yet the deaths of heavily bemedalled officers may not be the worst of it.
On March 29th Ukraine claimed to have killed Colonel Denis Kurilo, the commander of the 200th Separate Motorised Rifle Brigade, outside the eastern city of Kharkiv. Such officers are even more important cogs in Russia’s military machine, because they know the details of their combat units. “I think the heavy losses among Russian battalion, regiment and brigade commanders might be an even bigger issue than the losses of generals,” notes Rob Lee of King’s College London. “It is really difficult to replace these losses.”