Lt. Gen. Andrei Simonov was killed Saturday near the town of Izium in the northeastern Kharkiv region, according to Ukrainian authorities. The general was among 100 soldiers killed when a rocket-propelled grenade struck armored vehicles and tanks, marking another major loss for the Russian military since the nation first invaded Ukraine on February 24, the Kyiv Post reported. . Newsweek could not independently verify Simonov’s death. Simonov was a senior commander in cyber warfare, according to the Kyiv Post. Analysts say part of the reason so many generals were killed during the war is that leaders had to go to the front lines to motivate troops. A Ukrainian main battle tank leads to a road near Sviatochirsk, in eastern Ukraine, on April 30, 2022, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. YASUYOSHI CHIBA / AFP / Getty Images “They have to go to the troops at the front and try to encourage the troops to fight and kill themselves,” former Estonian military officer Riho Terras told Express UK. “It just shows me that the spirit is not there. “ The Ukrainian government also claimed last month that morale had dropped so much in parts of the Russian military that some troops were now refusing to fight. “The morale and psychological condition of these personnel are low and tend to deteriorate,” the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said in a statement on Facebook. A Pentagon official, meanwhile, told reporters Monday that Russian forces were still “suffering from poor control, low morale in many units” and “aversion to casualties,” according to the Washington Examiner. James Stavridis, the former commander-in-chief of NATO allies for Europe, also said this week that the number of Russian generals killed showed that the nation had shown “astonishing incompetence” throughout the war. “In modern history, there is no comparable situation regarding the deaths of generals,” Stavridis said during a radio interview with WABC 770 AM. “Just to make a point of comparison here, the United States in all our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq … in all these years and all these battles, not a single general has lost in real battles.” He added that he believed the Russian army was “unable to conduct logistics” and had “bad battle plans”. Last month, Newsweek compiled a list of several Russian generals killed during the war. The first general to be killed, Lt. Gen. Andrey Sukhovetsky, was reportedly shot by snipers on 28 February. Since the start of the war, NATO has estimated that Russia has lost between 7,000 and 15,000 troops. Ukraine, however, claims to have killed more than 20,000. In general, the death toll in Russia probably exceeded that in Ukraine, with Ukrainian officials claiming that about 3,000 of its soldiers have been killed, Forbes reported. However, the official death toll from Ukraine has not been independently verified by the US Newsweek contacted the Russian Foreign Ministry for further comments.
