Russia has lost another of its generals in the war in Ukraine, Kyiv has said, along with seven members of an elite force under Vladimir Putin’s direct command as Ukraine inflicts punishing losses on Moscow’s war machine.
Major-General Oleg Mityaev, 47, commander of the army’s 150th motorised rifle division, died fighting around the besieged city of Mariupol, Ukraine’s interior ministry said late Tuesday as officials released a photo of what they claimed was his corpse on the battlefield.
It marks the fourth Russian general that Ukraine claims to have taken out and the 13th officer overall, as Putin’s invading forces suffer heavy losses at the hands of dogged Ukrainian defenders.
Seven elite SWAT fighters from the feared Dzerzhinsky Division of Russia’s national guard were also revealed to have died in the fighting.
A mourning picture was released in Russia showing the photographs of six elite ‘maroon beret’ special forces fighters from the Vityaz Special Purpose Centre of the Dzerzhinsky Division, named after Soviet secret police founder Felix Dzerzhinsky. It was later revealed that a seventh had been slain.
Meanwhile respected test pilot Captain Alexander Garnaev quit a number of positions over the ‘completely incomprehensible’ war. ‘Sooner or later society will know the final number of losses [and] will be horrified,’ he added.
A Hero of Russia and Honoured Test Pilot, he launched a scathing attack on the way Ukrainian cities have been ‘bombed and crushed with tanks’.