What it Means for Russia to Lose Two Generals in its War Against Ukraine

Darrell Todd Maurina
5 min readMar 11, 2022

It’s expected that soldiers die in war. What’s not expected is for generals — not just one but two of them — to die in barely two weeks of what Russian military forces expected to be an easy victory over Ukraine.

What’s considerably more problematic is **WHO** the two Russian generals were.

Maj. Gen. Andrei Sukhovetsky had been a Spetsnaz (special forces) commander. A trained paratrooper, he had fought in most of the recent Russian combat operations including the Syrian civil war, Chechnya, and the Russo-Georgian war in which — very much like what’s now happening in Ukraine — several Russian-speaking regions of the former Soviet republic of Georgia broke away. He was also involved in the Russian annexation of the formerly Ukrainian territory of Crimea.

In other words, he’s been through this before. He knew what to expect, he knew how previous Russian operations had succeeded, and he clearly was not a leader the Russians wanted to lose — definitely not due to a Ukrainian sniper.

There’s still some uncertainty about the circumstances surrounding what appears to be a second dead Russian general, Maj. Gen. Vitaly Gerasimov. He had a similar background in Chechnya, Syria, and the Crimean annexation. What’s particularly interesting is that the…

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