Colonel Alexander Bespalov – who led the 59th Guards Tank Regiment – was buried in the central city of Ozersk on Friday. No details have been released on his death after it was revealed in a deleted post on a local message board – but the commander’s death follows the killing of eight other senior officers in the clash. Ukraine estimates that another 19,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, although NATO estimates that number is between 7,000 and 15,000. In that context, the Soviet Union lost just five generals and 15,000 troops during ten years of fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s. A photograph of Bespalov showed that he was an officer with high medals, with two rows of metal painted on his chest. The tributes were announced after the announcement of his funeral was deleted in “Overheard Novogorny” – an online forum based in the Ozersk region. One, allegedly from the colony’s sister, Tatiana Karsakova, said: “It is impossible to describe in words how much pain you feel when you lose a loved one. “Dear brother, you will always be alive in our hearts.” A fellow officer said: “I did not know and did not meet a more worthy man who had the right to call himself an officer by my first commander Alexander Bespalov, who became my friend.” The colonel is the ninth commander to be lost in what experts say is a brutal indictment of Moscow’s blunder invasion. Many of the nine are believed to have fled after approaching the front line in an attempt to boost failed morale among soldiers who faced much more deadly resistance than they had been warned to expect. Ukraine’s ability to target such commanders, meanwhile, is said to be due to the fact that the invading army was forced to use unencrypted channels of communication, effectively exposing their locations to the Western intelligence service. Speaking about the net casualties of the attackers, Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the head of Ukraine’s presidential administration, said on Friday that the country had tried to return the bodies of 3,000 regular soldiers to Russia at the beginning of the war, but Moscow had refused. He told the Washington Post: “They said: ‘We do not believe in such quantities. We do not have this number. We are not ready to accept them. “ Ukraine’s Interior Ministry has since set up a website and a Telegram channel for Russians to search for photos of dead and prisoners of war.
