Although the results of the Ukrainian counteroffensive are meager after a week, it seems for the moment to be targeting the Russian military high command, both physically and in terms of prestige, but in another field, that of information.
Russian media echoed Ukrainian media and speculated yesterday that General Adam Delimjanov was injured or dead. The bearded Delimjanov, a former Chechen independentist who has become a Duma parliamentarian in Moscow, no less, is the head of the Chechen division of the National Guard and number two to Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. In the Ukrainian war he had an important participation in the siege of Mariupol.
After hours of anxiety, Kadyrov said that his beloved Delimjanov was alive and well, “and he’s not even hurt.” According to the rumor that circulated, Delimjanov would have fallen during an attack against the Chechen paramilitary group Ajmat in Primorsk, on the coast of the Azov Sea and far from the front.
At least for a time, Delimjanov should not have been reachable, because Kadirov himself acknowledged having asked the Ukrainians for help in locating him. And the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, when asked at a press conference, said that “we received this information with great concern; we care, like everyone else, about the Hero of Russia”.
On the other hand, Moscow continued yesterday without confirming the death of the decorated division general Sergei Goryachev on the Zaporizhia front despite the fact that one of the pro-Russian authorities in the occupied area, Vladimir Rogov, communicated his death in a message of condolence on Telegram. He did so after one of the most prestigious Russian military bloggers broke the news, which was followed by others. Goryachev, 52, the head of the 35th Combined Arms Army, may have been the victim of a Ukrainian attack using Storm Shadow missiles (which Ukraine has recently received) and would be the first Russian general to die this year.
Russian military bloggers, some of whom often work from the front lines, have become Russia’s most reliable sources as they take a critical view on the course of military operations. Thus, it is not uncommon for Vladimir Putin to meet with war correspondents and bloggers on Tuesday, probably to tune the bagpipes, and criticize the “parquet generals”.
Thus, if yesterday’s rumors on social networks were confirmed, including the Gray Zone channel, close to the Wagner Group, they could be the ruin of a very questionable general. Ukrainian Himars missiles would have caused a massacre on the Kremnina front, in the province of Luhansk and one of the most active in the Donbass. There was talk of a hundred dead soldiers and as many wounded, and the reason would be that they were ordered to concentrate to listen to their general’s harangue. They would have been waiting two hours until the shells fell.
The major general responsible for keeping a large force concentrated too close to the front (although the Himars have a range of around 80 kilometers) would be the Chechen Sajrab Akhmedov, commander of the 20th Army. Akhmedov has such a reputation that it earned him written denunciations from his soldiers, who accused him, along with another Chechen general, Rustam Muradov, of having used 300 soldiers as cannon fodder and led to their deaths in four days. It happened last November in the battle of Palivka-Vuhledar, one of the most disastrous offensives of the Russian forces, which in three months cost 900 casualties.
Ajmédov and Murádov were, however, promoted last February. According to Gray Zone, based on “falsified reports.”
