Russia has finally admitted losing its first senior military intelligence officer during the war with Ukraine.
GRU spy Captain Alexey Glushchak died in the carnage in the Ukrainian port of Mariupol, although his country has given no details of how he was killed.
"Due to the strict secrecy of the military operation, the circumstances of the death of the Tyumen hero are not disclosed," a statement read.
The GRU was behind the Novichok poisoning in Salisbury of its former spy Sergei Skripal, who had defected to Britain.
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Pictures emerged of the funeral of father-of-one Glushchak, 31, from Tyumen in Siberia, Russia, where he was buried with full military honours amid a guard of honour.
On the day the military intelligence officer died he had spoken to both his wife and mother in Russia, the statement explained.
He called to congratulate them on International Women’s Day, but that evening they learned he had been killed.
His death coincides amid anger and dismay at the number of military coffins now returning to Russia, even though those officially acknowledged as having fallen in Ukraine are seen as a small fraction of the total number.
Best estimates suggest Russia's war dead now run into ‘many thousands’, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that 1,300 of his troops had died as of Sunday.
Glushchak will be posthumously decorated.
Moscow has given no up-to-date total of those killed in the war, and named only a handful of the fallen, which include several generals.
Many funerals that can be read or watched in the media are for soldiers slain at the end of February.
Russia is taking two weeks or more to transport their bodies back to relatives, many of whom live in the far east of the country, many thousands of miles from the bloody war zone.
The pain they're suffering when they do arrive is evident in an increasing number of hostile and anguished posts.
“When will this stop, we are seeing coffins almost daily?” said one.
“Why did we need to send our boys into this hell?” asked another.
A funeral was also held for Corporal Danil Novolodsky, 24, a senior gunner on an air assault artillery battery.
He was awarded the Order of Courage under a decree signed by Vladimir Putin.
He was from Ulan-Ude, capital of the republic of Buryatia in Siberia, a mainly Buddhist region, which has suffered a disproportionate number of fatalities among Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine.
Ahead of the invasion, tens of thousands of troops were sent west on the Trans-Siberian Railway to fight in the coming war.
Another funeral from the same region was held for Vladimir Plekhanov, 24, an orphan raised by a living foster family.
Sagyndyk Kudaibergenov, 22, from Tyumen, like the GRU agent , was buried with military honours, according to reports.
He was killed in mortar fire while deploying communications equipment across a river.
Kudaibergenov was killed on 26 February but was laid to rest on March 11.
