An unconfirmed report seemingly started on social media has sparked rumours that one of Russia’s top officials, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov, was killed.
The report appears to have originated on a social media platform, but the veracity of the message itself is in doubt.
Rumours over the well-being of General Gerasimov were linked to two strikes launched by Ukraine on the occupied Crimean Peninsula.
On January 4, Kyiv claimed to have led a strike on a Russian command post near the port city of Sevastopol and to have launched a separate one on a military unit near the city of Yevpatoria.
While the Russian Defence Ministry focused more on the battle put up by its air defence units, claiming they had downed several guided missiles and 36 drones flying over Crimea, Mikhail Razvozhayev, the Moscow-installed governor of Sevastopol, described the attack as “the most massive in recent times”.
One day after the Ukrainian success in Crimea, X user WarVehicleTracker shared an image seemingly showing a message published by a Russian Telegram channel called Ordinary Tsarism, which read: “According to preliminary data, Valery Gerasimov, who was in a command post near Sevastopol at the time of the attack, was killed in the attack on Crimea.”
At the time of writing, however, the group boasting more than 34,000 subscribers did not seem to present this message on its timeline, leading to speculation it may have been fabricated by social media users. Asked by Newsweek about the origin of the screenshot it shared, WarVehicleTracker said to have first seen the image on the social platform Discord.
Despite the dubious veracity of the claim, rumours about General Gerasimov’s death started spreading across various social media platforms.
Also on January 5, Telegram channel Crimean Wind shared a post claiming high-ranking officers and special forces were among the troops killed during the attack by Ukraine carried out the day prior – albeit the message did not name General Gerasimov.
While Russia hasn’t yet commented on the claim regarding General Gerasimov’s death, there isn’t concrete evidence he was killed on January 4 – or even that he was in Crimea at the time of the attack.
This is not the first time General Gerasimov’s well-being is the source of speculation online.
The general, who had previously been involved in the Second Chechen War and the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, was one of the main targets of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s tirades during the first half of 2023.
Mr Prigozhin, who considered General Gerasimov and Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu directly responsible for the unsatisfactory course of the invasion of Ukraine, launched on June 23 a short-lived mutiny.
After this attempted coup, which shook the Kremlin to the core, General Gerasimov was one of the officials to mysteriously drop out of public view for more than two weeks, attracting rumours about their well-being and whether he was even still alive.
He made his first public appearance since the mutiny in a video released on July 10.
