STRATEGIC ASSESSMENT-In a ceremony deserving of his rank, Russian Major General Vladimir Frolov was laid to rest in St. Petersburg’s Serafimovskoe Cemetery, where tens of thousands of victims of World War II are buried.
“Today we say goodbye to a true hero. Vladimir Petrovich Frolov died a heroic death in battle with Ukrainian nationalists. He sacrificed his life so that children, women and the elderly in the Donbas would no longer have to hear the explosions of bombs,” St. Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov told attendees at the funeral last month.
It was the second time in less than a week that Beglov was obliged to pay his respects to a high-ranking Russian officer killed in Ukraine.
Just four days later, Lieutenant Colonel Miras Basakov was laid to rest in Russia’s second-largest city.
A startling number of senior Russian officers are reported to have perished since President Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24.
Analysts who spoke to The Moscow Times said the rate of attrition has reduced Russia’s capacity to plan and execute military operations and delivered a blow to morale on the frontline.
“Every death of a general makes the Russian Armed Forces less effective,” independent military analyst Pavel Luzhin told The Moscow Times.
Frolov is one of a total of 12 Russian generals to be killed in Ukraine in just over two months of fighting, according to a report Thursday by The New York Times. That is twice the number of generals killed in the Soviet Union’s 10-year military campaign in Afghanistan (James Beardsworth)
