Ukraine’s defence ministry says Russian Lieutenant General Yakov Rezantsev has been killed by Ukrainian forces near the southern city of Kherson, the seventh Russian general to die since the invasion began.
Comment: It appears that Ukraine is successfully targeting command and control units. As observed by Col. Lang, the Russian Army structure apparently does not foster the development of initiative in senior NCO’s and junior officers – hence the presence relatively far forward of General officers.
I would imagine that NATO Communications traffic analysis (Rivet Joint?) is being used to pinpoint the likely real time locations of higher headquarters cadres. One wonders therefore why the Russians wouldn’t use decoy groups to mask the Generals whereabouts or perhaps they are unsuccessfully trying to do just that.
I suppose that such a situation creates opportunities for promotion.
Assassinations invite retaliations. It will even out eventually.
If Skripal was real, as apparently much of the Borg believes, then they better double up on insurance. Good thing they just raised the military life insurance payout.
Skripal was a fence. He was going to pass on the poison to an assassination squad. A close associate of the late Boris Beresovsky’s was killed a week later anyway.
Its not assassination on a battlefield. There is something to be said for a Commander who shares the risks of combat with his men as opposed to hiding in an air conditioned bunker a hundred miles away but perhaps I am just being a soft headed romantic. Perhaps the General concerned was in his bunker anyway.
What would Gen. Patton have said?
>>>Its not assassination on a battlefield.<<<
True but the U.S. is not at war with Russia, we are covertly helping Ukraine kill Russians. Look at how we reacted to this treatment. The U.S. govt bellowed that Iran is a terrorist state because they gave weapons to kill 600 U.S. serviceman in Iraq. The IRGC did not kill anyone, they just supported native Iraqis fighting a foreign army, yet we call this terrorism.
Bitterness over these types of operations invited retaliation even if it is not based on logic and consistency.
It is said that during the battle of Waterloo, a British artillery officer reported to Wellington that he had a clear a view of Napoleon and several guns pointing in that direction. Wellington replied, “No! I’ll not allow it. It is not the business of commanders to be firing upon one another.”
If he had lost he would have been hung for that.
How many Ukranian generals were killed in the central HQs in the first hours? That is the necessary comparison.
I used to have a tank brigade but now I have lost several
My fresh assaults are faltering with battle plans extemporal
I can’t recover vehicles but farmers in a tractor can
It’s all becoming rather reminiscent of Afghanistan
My ordnance is the best but only half my missiles make it there
I would have thought by now that we would be controllers of the air
But at the rate the snipers work my time here is ephemeral
I am the very model of a Russian Major General
This is certainly not mine. I wish it was. The poet, satirist and photographer of cats is @AndrejNkv from Edinburgh, Scotland.
Gilbertov and Sullivanski.
On a more serious note, How close to the Polish border will the Russians engage attractive targets? Twice the CEP?
TTG,
It seems to need a little poetic romanticism to believe that David will be triumphant….
TTG –
Is the Chechen, General Tushaev, included among the seven?
Leith,
I’m fairly certain the number of generals and colonels killed is debatable. I’ve seen reports that Tushaev is still alive.
Hope not but if he was he has risen from the dead today. Photographed in Mariupol with the Chechen leader Kadyrov this morning.
Link?
Here.
https://strategika51.org/2022/03/29/kadyrov-a-mariupol-le-regiment-dazov-en-debandade/
Quite the non-partisan, objective source there.
JLD –
Your link claims that it is General Mordvichev returned from the dead and schmoozing with Kadyrov. Definitely not Tushaev.
As far as Kadyrov now being a Lieutenant General, I seriously doubt that Russia’s 150th Motorized Rifle Division and 810th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade that are doing the bulk of the fighting at Mariupol will take orders from him. Although Kadyrov’s promotion does give Putin a scapegoat for any failures.
The photo of the Tuvan sharpshooters is interesting. I wonder if their fathers and uncles were the snipers back 30+ years ago that were murdering many of Kyzyl City’s large Russian community?
Generals actually involved in combat.
Definitely not a concept Pentagon is familiar with.
As the Colonel says – it is good for morale.
James,
It’s definitely good for Ukrainian morale. I wonder if killing one’s own brigade commander is good for a unit’s morale. It’d be cathartic if nothing else.
“Russian Col. Yuri Medvedev was run over by his own men with a tank this week. The 37th Motor Rifle Brigade reportedly turned on him after many men died during an attack. Medvedev’s legs were injured and he was taken to a hospital where a Western official said he died, according to the British outlet. The official said he died “as a consequence of the scale of the losses taken by his own brigade.””
“Ukraine’s defence ministry says”…..
Well, OK then. Must be true.
How many times did the Pentagon claim they nailed Mohammed Omar?
General Reszantsev was the second general to be killed at Kherson International Airport, which is almost certainly the command and control center for the entire Russian southern front. The first was Lt. General Andrey Mordichev, commander of the 8th army of the southern military district, killed apparently (?) in a headquarters bunker by artillery attack around March 18-19, when his death was announced. Kherson International Airport is also a military airfield, lying about 7 miles northwest of Kherson in what is called ‘steppe’, meaning there is not much cover. The Ukrainian army has been trying desperately to recover the city. There have been more than six small but effective counterattacks, as, for example, in the destruction of helicopters. Kherson itself is a port city on the Dnieper which is connected to the Crimea by the Antonovskiy bridge, where there was intense fighting a month ago, after which Russia gained control of the city. Russian assets concentrated in Crimea have to come over this bridge for any attack on Nikolaev (Mykolaiv) or Odessa (Odesa). In my view, Russia has to control the entire Kherson oblast, not just that city. Russia cannot afford to give up Kherson. This is made obvious by several centuries of history when control of the Dnieper/ Bug estuary was the critical point of conflict in most of TWELVE wars over a number of centuries between the Ottoman Turks and Tsarist Russia. That this part of the Black Sea littoral would be Russian was decided in 1788 by the capture of the fort on the peninsula at Ochakov in the reign of Catherine II, ‘The Great.’ (And that excludes the Crimean War. In which, incidentally, some 500,000 people died of all causes, according to the Britannica. That almost seems worse than the war in the United States 1861-65 which followed a few years later.)
If you drew in a scalene triangle on a map of this southern region and connected Kherson to Mykolayiv (40 miles) and Mykolayiv to Odessa (70 miles) and then from Odessa back to Kherson (100 miles?) you will have inside it what I think is a very critical area of this war. Ochakov lies about a mile or so across from the Kinburn Spit. The spit is some twenty-five miles long and becomes much wider when it gets from the Micholayiv Oblast up to the Kherson Oblast. It is a fascinating place, might be particularly so for those blog wallahs whose thoughts have turned now as spring approaches to the mysteries of the swatchways and little ships. The water tribe would love this place. Google has some really neat videos under the entry “Kinburn Spit.”
Russia has to take Ochakov. Just like their great admiral John Paul Jones did in 1788. Along with Suvarov and Prince Potemkin, of course.
The father of the United States Navy was a Russian admiral! The spy who came in from the cold?
Tidewater –
Strange looking boats the Cossacks used in those twisting channels: capable of being steered from both aft and bow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaika_(boat)
Probably also good for the many rapids on the Dniepr back in the day. Long before American Hugh Lincoln Cooper built the dam at Zaporizhzhia in 1932.
Leith,
Those fore and aft sweepers oars must be common for river transport. They’re used on James River batteaux here in Virginia along with poles. No sails, though. There’s a fleet of them still plying the James River. There’s some videos of them in action on their Facebook page.
https://www.facebook.com/Batteau/
Leith,
I made a virtual journey by YouTube up Dnieper recently and was surprised to see the lock at Zaporizhzhia that lifts a ship up to and allows it to gently float out onto that enormous lake up there will take you up 114 feet! That’s the most I have ever heard of.
What is odd to me though is that the established bridge height on the Dnieper is only about 58 feet, while that of bridges over the American ICW (Atlantic) is set at 65 feet. It seems that a lot of ships including warships (excluding the Buyan river gunboat class) must surely not be expected to get upriver. You could put an entire navy up the Hudson. I looked at Kherson and that bridge, impressive as it is, absolutely does not have a draw bridge.
Another thing about the dam is the photographic work of Margaret Bourke-White that I saw in that old Life magazine photo essay about the dam. I was thinking about the authority an artist can have over an age. I look at her photographs and I think, ‘Oh yes, of course, Margaret Bourke-White!’ Her photographs really do seem to tower over those 30’s, 40’s, 50’s decades. Particularly when she’s shooting over the edge of the Chrysler building or such. And then I find that she was married to Erskine Caldwell! Who went to UVa! The guy who wrote God’s Little Acre and Tobacco Road went to UVa!
Maybe the oar on the front is just that on that river in those rapids the truth of Matthew 20:16 is to be made manifest, not that I understand how the Cossacks could have been all that religious, given that painting by Ilya Repin. And it just occurred to me, if St. Columba and his twelve disciples went out to Iona in coracles wouldn’t that have also made them dervishes?
Tidewater –
Maggie the Indestructible. I still have my Dad’s copy of ‘Purple Heart Valley’. He bought it in his old age. In his youth he was at the Rapido River in ’44.
Who did she do the photo-shoot of Zaporizhzhia for – General Electric or the Soviets? I understand she was in Moscow in ’41 during Barbarossa photographing Stalin.
Regarding putting an “entire navy up the Hudson”, you could do the same out west here and send them up the Columbia to Portland.
Tidewater,
Only if they want to use Kherson as a port. Not taking it still leaves Ukraine with Odessa as the only port available to them.
I know very little about it, but Odessa does have a large pro-Russian population. The mayor is Russian, but because of the war– which I regard as being a forced move, imposed on Putin and long prepared for by NATO and Ukraine–, he has become a resistance leader. Odessa is also a beautiful city, and I think it will do no good for anyone to bomb it at this point. Some sort of peace agreement or partition will make all this irrelevant. Commerce will still go down the Bug river–an important river rising solely in the Ukraine, unlike Dnieper, and a conduit from the center and (western) right bank which always had its own Polish- Galician- RC identity (read almost ANYONE including Kennan or Kissinger on this) — no matter if the estuary is Russian controlled, with a fort at Ochakov and customs there, or not. The same with the Dnieper and Odessa. But Russia will henceforth have the security of control of most of the Black Sea littoral and will have both a buffer zone of an EEC as well as the off-shore twelve-mile limit if that is what it is nowadays. I am writing off the cuff.
I actually believe that there could come a point when Russia uses a few dialed back tactical nuclear weapons if a large Ukrainian offensive is caught out in the steppe, just to bring the US to its senses, like the slap in the face the pilot commander of Air Force One gave an hysterical Lyndon Johnson as they prepared to get out of Dallas.
Where could such a limited, small-scale nuclear weapons attack take place? I am aware this might sound to someone who went through the Cuban missile crisis like rampant, hyperbolic nonsense, but I do think these weapons are a tool in the toolbox, and sooner or later someone –could be Americans in an Indian ocean -Persian Gulf amphibious operation–will reach into that toolbox. I was told by a young petty officer who had worked with the NSA on frigates in the Red Sea and Indian ocean back in 1989 that nuclear weapons were a part of American doctrine even then. He believed that. I don’t know if he had gotten the lecture on this or not. He was a friend but he still kept mostly mum on stuff I was interested in.
Where could this world-shaking nuclear event happen? What I suspect is that Russia is very concerned about Kherson, and has moved a number of troops from the Georgia region to defend the gains in the south. They have been seen in Melitopol. That is why there might be a stall on closing the Kessel in the east if some troops now freed up from Mariupol have to be shifted over to Kherson. The focus is now to protect Crimea and Kherson. (You do not mess with Crimea! ) The distance down from Mykolayiv to a village called Posad-Pokrovske is only 21 miles. The distance from Posad-Pokrovske to Kherson International Airport, where southern forces are commanded, is only 16 miles. It is really only about thirty-some miles outskirt to outskirt between Mykolaiv and Kherson. There are important highways in this area–the M-14 to Mykolayiv and around to Odessa, and the M-17 through Crimea to Kerch, after which it becomes Russian A- 280. The distance from Krasnodar, Russia, to Melitopol, Ukraine, can be driven in only about eight hours going through Taman and Kerch.
What I think could happen is that Ukraine will mount a strong offensive down towards Kherson which Russia will finally only be able to stop by using tactical nuclear weapons. Or Russia will just see an irresistible opportunity out there in the steppe. I think something just might happen in the area of Posad-Pokrovske.
Boeing RC-135W Rivet Joint (call signs Jake11 and Homer11) have been active all during the invasion.
https://globe.adsbexchange.com
Pardon my lack of sophistication – but do you know whose airspace they have been flying in?
James – Mostly Poland’s airspace.
Mostly Eastern Polish border along Ukraine, Belarus, few times along Kaliningrad/Suwalki gap(which is interesting!), and Romania.
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=AE01D1
https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=AE01CC
This is a story that cries out to be told. While participating as 50 “indigenous” with an A Team at Eglin AF Base during Braveshield XV, one of our guys was a soon to be released Ranger. I’d met him already in the mess hall. He was a cook, having punched up, but too good to punish harshly. He was a native Florida boy. One night, without encouragement, he made his way from our swampy, hidey spot to the field headquarters of the 24th Infantry. There, he made is way to the trailer of the Commanding General, General Rosenblum/Rosenthal (?). The General opened the door and my friend said, “bang Sir, you’re dead.” The General invited him in and they talked for a long while before my friend headed back out and came back to us. The SF guys LOVED this! They got on the horn, and after hours of negotiations, including a description of the General’s boxer underwear and the inside of his trailer, they admitted to the loss of a high-ranking officer. I’ll bet these Ukraine boys, grown up in their lands, can get in there, too.
Twaddle.
Aren’t tanks dangerous even in peace time? People are run over or sleep underneath when the tank is parked on soft ground; that sort of thing. In the stress of war, maybe this particular guy just didn’t pay enough attention and got in the way?
Why am I wrong?
Ramzan Kadyrov just got a promotion from TicToc Commander to LT General
https://mobile.twitter.com/NeilPHauer/status/1508426419273142278?cxt=HHwWjMC4qcP1gO8pAAAA
Maybe his Instagram app metadata can provide a juicy target for a Bayraktar TB2 drone strike? He’s in Ukraine 😀
https://t.me/RKadyrov_95/1671
https://t.me/RKadyrov_95/1670