A Russian military police chief from an army dynasty is the latest colonel in Vladimir Putin’s forces to be killed in Ukraine, according to reports.
Lt-Colonel Georgy Petrunin, 48, was the seventh of eight generations of his Cossack family to serve in the tsarist, Soviet and Russian armies.
He was the commandant of Samara military police and was reportedly killed at an unannounced location in Ukraine.
Details of how he was killed have not been released but Putin’s forces are haemorrhaging senior officers, having lost dozens of his finest generals and colonels.
His two sons aged 27 and 18 followed him into military careers, say reports.
The eldest is in military intelligence and his younger son is a cadet.
Petrunin had served in wars in Syria and Chechnya.
The colonel is reportedly due to be buried on Tuesday in Volgograd.
It comes as Putin is preparing to send thousands of inexperienced new conscripts to fight in Ukraine as his invasion continues to stall, Western officials believe.
Russia has signed some 130,000 new conscripts into its army. The number is “unusually high” leading intelligence chiefs to believe some will be sent to the war in Ukraine.
It comes as the Russian president is redeploying his forces in Georgia to bolster his invasion.
“According to our defence intelligence, Russia is redeploying elements of forces in Georgia to reinforce the invasion of Ukraine,” a western official said on Monday.
“We don’t think this was planned, it’s a very odd thing for the Russian military to do so we expect it’s indicative of the problems they’re having in Ukraine.
“They’ve done the biannual draft but Putin has signed over 130,000 new conscripts into the army. The timing aligns with previous spring drafts but we think that’s an unusually high number.
“We do think there is a realistic possibility these conscripts will be sent to Ukraine, even though the Russian MoD has said only professional soldiers will go to Ukraine.”
Elsewhere, Volodymyr Zelensky visited the town of Bucha on Monday where civilians were killed in what has been widely condemned as war crimes.
The Ukrainian president spoke to locals about the horrors inflicted on their community and vowed Putin and soldiers who brought such “evil to our land” would be punished for war crimes.
Britain condemned the “whole new world of horror” unleashed by Putin and vowed to lead the global response to force him to end his barbaric invasion.
