Third enemy general killed in action, claims Ukraine

UKRAINE’S military claimed to have killed a third Russian major general in the latest blow to Vladimir Putin’s faltering invasion of the country.

“The good news is that Major General Andrei Kolesnikov, Commander of the 29th Army of the Eastern Military District, [was] KIA [killed in action] today,” Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to the Ukrainian interior minister, wrote on Telegram yesterday.

Further details of his death were not immediately available.

Maj Gen Kolesnikov’s troops have been involved in battles to the northwest of Kyiv.

Western security officials confirmed that a Russian general had been killed but could not say where or how he died.

There had probably been around 20 Russian major generals deployed in Ukraine, the officials said, of whom three have now died.

This could suggest Russian “troops are unable to make decisions of their own and lack situational awareness, or [are] fearful of moving forward, at which point more senior officers [lead] from the front”, they added.

Maj Gen Vitaly Gerasimov, the chief of staff of the 41st Army, was reported to have died on Tuesday, after details were intercepted on mobile telephone communications.

‘The good news is that Major General Andrei Kolesnikov was killed in action today’

He appears to have been killed near Kharkiv.

A few days earlier Maj Gen Andrei Sukhovetsky, the commanding officer of the Russian Seventh Airborne Division and deputy commander of the 41st Combined Arms Army, was killed near Kyiv, apparently by a Ukrainian sniper.

Ukraine claims to have killed around 12,000 Russian soldiers since the war began on Feb 24.