Ukrainian military intelligence says a senior Russian commander involved in the attack on Kharkiv has been killed. Ukraine's armed forces say Major General Vitaly Gerasimov, a veteran of the second Chechen war and Russian operations in Syria, has been killed along with several senior officers.

In support of the allegations, the Ukrainians published recordings of intercepted telephone conversations between a field officer from the Russian FSB in the Kharkiv region and his chief. In the first of them, the two discuss how difficult the situation is and whether it was possible to remove the dead. The two men also say that they could not speak through a secure system because it did not work. In the second call, the field officer named Gerasimov as a victim and after a pause, his boss started swearing.

Investigative journalist Hristo Grozev of Bellingcat checked the Russian phone number in the call, claiming it belonged to a senior FSB officer named Dmitry Shevchenko in the Russian city of Tula. “It is alleged to be from Ukrainian military intelligence. Confirmed [by] a Russian source,” Grozev said on Twitter in a post on the incident.

Gerasimov was the first deputy commander of the 41st Army of Russia's Central Military District. Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, suffered some of the worst damage during the war as a result of prolonged Russian bombing.

/Novinite.bg

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