More than 20 Russian generals have died in fighting in Ukraine since February last year. This was reported by the Nikkei newspaper with reference to Japanese intelligence data obtained in cooperation with intelligence services from the United States and Europe.
The mass death of high-ranking officers is unusual for the West and may indicate weakness in the Russian military, the publication said. The list of losses in the material is not given, the names of the dead are not called.
Information about the deaths of four Russian generals appeared in open sources, following the monitoring of the publication Mediazona. One of them, 63-year-old Major General Konamat Botashev, was officially retired at the time of his death and would have served in the Wagner PMC aviation.
Earlier, military experts noted that the relatively high death rate of senior officers in the Russian army is due to the fact that they have to manually control the fighting on the battlefield. This, on the one hand, is explained by the weak organization of the command, on the other hand, by the structure of the Russian army with a relatively large number of senior officers.
Nikkei notes that the death of the generals is also explained by the superiority of Ukraine in electronic intelligence and the network of informants created in the Ukrainian territories controlled by the Russian army.
A Japanese intelligence official told the newspaper that the failure of the Russian military, demonstrated by the deaths of generals, could worry China and that Beijing could start providing covert military assistance to Moscow. What exactly is at stake is not specified in the document.
Russia does not disclose the losses in Ukraine, Western sources estimate them at between 100 and 200 thousand people, including the wounded.
Moscow claims dozens of Ukrainian generals killed during hostilities, open data does not confirm this, Kiev does not disclose casualties.
