The British Ministry of Defense’s daily update highlights “extreme attrition” of Russian forces.
According to the report, three successive commanders of one of Russia’s most prestigious airborne regiments have either resigned or been killed since February 2022. As recently as early September, the commander of the 247th Guards Airborne Regiment, Colonel Vasily Popov, was apparently killed in the heavily contested Orikhiv sector.
Just a few weeks earlier, in August 2023, his predecessor, Colonel Pyotr Popov, had apparently resigned his command. Independent Russian media claim that he acted in protest against the military’s failure to recover the bodies of Russian victims.
Shows grinding exercise of the military
Similarly, in the first weeks of the invasion, the then-commander of the 247th, Colonel Konstantin Zizevsky, was killed. According to the British Ministry of Defense, the experience of the 247th illustrates the “extreme attrition and high turnover” of Russian forces in action, even in relatively high ranks.
Image: Kremlin.ru, Vladimir Putin at the site Donguzsky (2015-09-19) 10.jpg, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (image size changed)
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