A devastating new blow has been dealt to Vladimir Putin with the loss of his ninth general killed during the course of the war in Ukraine.
Major-General Andrei Simonov, 55, was killed in battle in Izyum near Kharkov, the country’s second city, according to Ukrainian sources.
He was Russia ’s most respected electronics warfare commander, serving with the 2nd Combined Arms Army, and died in a devastating fightback by the Ukrainians against a Russian offensive.
More than 30 Russian armoured vehicles were destroyed in the attack along with around 100 Russians troops, unconfirmed reports suggest.
As well as losing nine generals, Putin's army has seen 36 colonels slain in little over two months fighting in what military experts say this is an astonishing rate of attrition.
Losing senior military members can be a sign that an army is suffering from ill discipline as generals and colonels are required to take control of their forces on the front lines.
Putin has now sent his chief of defence staff General Valery Gerasimov to take personal command of the Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine.
Sinonov’s death alongside 100 Russian troops - and the reported loss of armoured vehicles - indicates another setback for the Kremlin leader who aimed to declare the success of his mission on 9 May, Victory Day in Russia, marking the anniversary of the end of the Second World War.
He is far from the only high profile military man to lose their life in the course of the invasion.
Lieutenant General Andrey Mordvichev, one of Putin’s most senior commanders and in charge of the 8th All-Military Army of the Kremlin’s vast Southern Military District, was killed at the beginning of March.
So was Colonel Sergei Sukharev, one of Russia's top paratroop commanders and part of the country's most elite fighting squads.
While the exact number of people killed during the war is difficult to determine, it is clear that Russia has endured far greater losses than it initially expected.
Last week UK Defence Minister Ben Wallace said that 15,000 Russian troops had died so far.
The rate of fatalities among the invading army's number is now decreasing as the scope of the offensive is narrowed, a Western official told Reuters.
Having failed in an assault on Kyiv in the north of Ukraine last month, Russia is now trying to fully capture two eastern provinces known as the Donbas.
"The nature of the operations have been reduced in terms of geographic spread so the overall numbers are reducing," one of the officials said on Russian casualties.
"But the level of casualties that we're seeing in terms of those areas where they are engaging Ukrainian forces are still remaining quite high."
Asked about Ukrainian casualties, he said there had been Ukrainian losses in the Donbas.
"They are taking some losses (but) certainly not at the sort of scale that Russian forces are taking," the official said.
He added: "Those losses on Russian forces, we assessed to be having a significant impact on the will to fight of wider Russian forces, but the Ukrainian losses are not affecting the morale of the Ukrainian forces."
Russia, which says it launched a "special operation" to demilitarise its neighbour, has not updated its official casualty figures in several weeks.
Today the UK's Ministry of Defence predicted that a quarter of the battalions Russia sent into Ukraine had been rendered combat ineffective.
