Vladimir Putin has lost a senior FSB secret services commander believed to be the most senior operative in the feared Russian group to have been killed amid the war in Ukraine.
Lt Col Nikolay Gorban, 36, is the 99th known colonel or lieutenant-colonel to be killed in the devastating conflict.
It comes as the latest blow to the Russian President, after a missile took out his first female colonel, Olga ‘Kursa’ Kachura just last week.
According to InfoNapalm journalist Andrey Pavlushko, Gorban was a commander in the elite FSB Spetsnaz special forces troops.
He died “somewhere in Ukraine on August 2,” Mr Pavlushko said.
Gorban was believed to be the most senior operative from the feared FSB - once headed by Putin - to die in the five month conflict.
An official online citation mourning his loss said he “participated in the conduct of combat activities and special operations both in Russia and abroad".
“In the course of carrying out combat missions, he proved himself to be a courageous and decisive officer," it added.
“He was proud of his service in the Russian FSB.”
In another blow to the Kremlin, Colonel Vasily Kleshchenko, an army aviation commander, was also listed as killed.
He was deputy head of the 344th combat use and retraining centre for elite helicopter pilots and snipers.
Before the war he ran the world's only aerobatic team based on Berkut combat helicopters based in Russia’s Tver region.
He was the 98th known colonel or lieutenant colonel to die.
The latest deaths show how Putin’s war is haemorrhaging commanders in his armed forces and security services.
Russia has also seen a dozen generals slain in the war.
Last week Kremlin forces lost Olga ‘Korsa’ Kachura, 52, Putin’s first woman colonel to die in the Ukraine war.
She was a colonel in the forces of Russian puppet state Donetsk People’s Republic, where she commanded a rocket artillery division deployed against Ukraine.
Putin posthumously awarded her the Hero of Russia honour “for courage and heroism shown in the performance of military duty”.
Kachura recently featured in a documentary on the Russia Today TV channel - which has been banned in the UK for spouting Putin's propaganda - in which she alluded to herself being like a "she-wolf".
She said: "She guards the hearth, her children, her family. Even in nature, no wolf will defend her cub as aggressively as a she-wolf."
