A TOP Russian army general has been killed in Ukraine in the latest blow to Vladimir Putin.
Major-General Sergey Goryachev, 52, was struck by a long-range British-supplied Storm Shadow missile in Zaporizhzhia region, according to Moscow war sources.
He was Chief of Staff of the Russian 35th Combined Arms Army, and is one of at least 11 generals reported to have died in the war.
Goryachev is understood to have been killed alongside other senior officers.
Popular Russian war blogger Anatoliy Shariy said that Goryachev was hit by a UK-supplied Anglo-French Storm Shadow missile.
Storm Shadow air-launched cruise missiles can travel up to 600mph and blast targets up to 350 miles away.
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It means the weapons could hit targets at maximum range in just 35 minutes – travelling nearly half the length of the UK.
Shariy posted: “Another hello from the British and French.
“He did not die alone.
“There is no information in Russian sources, so most likely we will see details from obituaries.
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“[But] along with him, at least eight staff officers died, [and] several were wounded.”
He said Gorbachev died on the Vremievsky Ledge in Zaproizhzhia region.
Ukrainian expert Mikhail Zhirokhov told Nastoyashchee Vremya that the general died in a different strike in another region, Kherson, on a military HQ in occupied Ukraine on Saturday.
He claimed it was a major blow to Russia.
Zhirokhov said: “Usually, next to a general [there are] colonels, lieutenant colonels, majors, who provide headquarters activities [who] die.
“Therefore, such an attack on the command post of the 35th Army before a big [Ukrainian] offensive is a very serious bid for success.”
Pictures at the time showed a burning building close to Henichesk on the Arabat Spit, close to annexed Crimea.
Earlier it was revealed that a leading Kremlin crony of Putin’s deputy PM Denis Manturov, 54, had departed minutes before the strike.
The facility is believed to have been visited by Putin in April in a rare visit by the president to the war zone.
Neither official Russian nor Ukrainian sources have confirmed the circumstances of the general’s reported death.
It comes after Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said the country's troops recaptured a total of seven villages of eastern Ukraine over the past week small successes in the early phases of a counteroffensive.
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Russian officials didn't confirm those Ukrainian gains, which were impossible to verify and could be reversed in the to-and-fro of war.
The advance amounted to only small bits of territory and underscored the difficulty of the battle ahead for Ukrainian forces, who will have to fight meter by meter to regain roughly one-fifth of their country under Russian occupation.
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