A pedestrian walks amid debris in a street following a shelling in Ukraine’s second-biggest city of Kharkiv on March 7, 2022.
Sergey Bobok | AFP | Getty Images
Ukraine’s defense intelligence agency said Monday that its country’s forces had killed Russian Army Major General Vitaly Gerasimov, and that other senior Russian Army officers “were also killed or wounded” in action near the city of Kharkiv.
Gerasimov was identified by the intelligence agency as the chief of staff and first deputy commander of the 41st Combined Arms Army.
He previously participated in the second Chechen war, and Russian military actions in Syria, according to the agency’s post announcing his demise.
The agency, which said Gerasimov had been “liquidated,” claimed that data obtained related to his death “show significant problems with communication” in Russia’s army, “and with the evacuation of their defeated units.”
The post contains embedded audio files purporting to be intercepted communications between Russians discussing Gerasimov’s death near Kharkiv, which is the second-largest city in Ukraine.
The online investigative news outlet Bellingcat reported that the phone number of the person receiving that call belongs to a senior officer in the FSB, Russia’s national security agency, who was linked to the phone by open-source data.
The reported killing comes days after another deputy commander of the 41st Combined, Gen. Andrei Sukhovetsky, was fatally shot by a Ukrainian sniper. Sukhovetsky also was commanding general of Russia’s 7th Airborne Division.
Russian President Vladimir Putin last week confirmed Sukhovetsky’s death.
