‘Winging It’: Russia Is Getting Its Generals Killed on the Front Lines

Russia has lost at least five generals fighting in Ukraine in less than a month, Western officials said Monday, as communications failures and a lack of discipline among hundreds of thousands of conscripted Russian troops have made it more difficult to communicate orders to the front lines.

The tally of Russian generals killed in the nearly monthlong conflict—most of them one- and two-star commanders, including at least one lieutenant general—is likely the highest death rate among general officers in the Russian military since World War II.

On Sunday, Mykhailo Podoliak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said six Russian generals had been killed, calling the invading army “fully unprepared” for the fight in Ukraine. Western assessments of deaths among Russian commanders are slightly more conservative. One European diplomat familiar with Western intelligence assessments told Foreign Policy on Monday that at least five Russian generals had been killed, owing mostly to failures in electronic communications equipment that left them vulnerable to targeted strikes and to their efforts to get a large force of nearly 200,000 troops—many of them young conscripts—to follow orders by leading from the front.

“They’re struggling on the front line to get their orders through,” said the European diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss recent battlefield intelligence. “They’re having to go to the front line to make things happen, which is putting them at much greater risk than you would normally see.”