Russian General Killed in Ukrainian Strike – Latest in ‘Inconceivable’ Toll

A senior Russian officer was killed Tuesday during a Ukrainian strike on a command post near Russian-occupied Berdiansk in the southern Zaporizhzhia region, Ukrainian officials said.

Lt. General Oleg Tsokov, deputy commander of Russia’s southern military district, died when a Ukrainian-fired Storm Shadow missile flattened the Dunes Hotel on the Sea of Azov, south of Mariupol. 

The hotel was “where the military leadership of the occupiers lived,” Bediansk’s exiled city administration said in a statement. “The building was actually leveled to the ground.”

"Today, in the area of Berdiansk, Russian Lieutenant General Tsokov, Oleg Yurievich, was killed," Petro Andriushchenko, adviser to Mariupol’s exiled mayor, said on Twitter, using the inverted phrasing of the General's name. 

Prior to the invasion of Ukraine, Tsokov fought in Russia's two wars against Chechnya and in Syria as well, the Moscow Times reported. He was awarded two Orders of Courage and one Order of Military Merit.

Staggering losses of Russian officers

Since the early days of last year's invasion, Russia has suffered a remarkable spate of fatalities among its generals and other senior officers in Ukraine.  

In June, Major General Sergei Goryachev, 52, was killed "as a result of an enemy missile attack" in the same Zaporizhzhia region where Tsokov was reported killed.

Since its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia has confirmed the deaths of four generals; Ukraine claims that 15 Russian generals have been killed, and Western officials have put the number at 8. All those figures were given prior to the reports of Gen. Tsokov's death Tuesday.

Even at the lower end, the toll is remarkably high. In two decades of war in Vietnam, 9 American generals were killed, most when their helicopters were shot down. Only one U.S. general died during the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; he was shot by a renegade Afghan soldier. And during the decade-long Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, 5 Soviet generals were killed. 

The high-level Russian losses in Ukraine have reached beyond the generals’ ranks. According to a June assessment by the independent Russian-language news outlet Mediazona, the overall number of senior Russian officers killed during the war includes 58 colonels and 176 lieutenant colonels.

Western military and intelligence officials have attributed the toll to factors ranging from faulty battlefield communications to poor command and control procedures to the likely influence of western intelligence help for Ukraine - all of which have left high-level officers exposed. 

Whatever the causes, the losses are “inconceivable” in modern warfare - that’s the word Gen. David Petraeus, a former top U.S. commander and CIA director, used when asked about the issue last year. 

“It is inconceivable to lose so many general officers,” Petraeus told Grid. “The loss in experience and expertise are enormous, and the disruption has to be equally so.”