Russia just lost its largest group of officers in one strike
1 hour ago · 9 October 2026Share
The building where Stalingrad military region's headquarters took place, Akhmatovskaya Street, Astrakhan, Russia. File photo. EKuvaeva · CC BY-SA 4.0
Mediazona just named 20 Russian officers killed in one strike.
It's the worst single loss of Russian officers of the whole war.
So here's what happened. On 26 August, a Ukrainian missile strike hit Russian military headquarters in Donetsk. Eighteen officers died that day. Two more died later from their injuries.
Mediazona is a Russian independent investigative outlet. It works with the BBC's Russian Service.
The strike hit the headquarters of the Central Military District, and separately the headquarters of the 41st Combined Arms Army. Together, those two run Russia's "Centre" Group of Forces on this part of the front.
By rank, that's seven colonels, six lieutenant colonels, five majors, one captain and one senior lieutenant.
And Mediazona has named names.
Colonel Artyom Berdyugin, 38, ran intelligence planning for the Central Military District. Colonel Alexander Kalyanov, 50, ran its Special Intelligence Division. Colonel Sergei Legky, 47, was deputy chief of its electronic warfare troops.
So why is this news now, six weeks later? Because the strike itself was already known. Telegram channels on both sides reported it the night it happened. What's new today is the identification.
And here's how they did it. Mediazona cross-checked leaked rosters of military staff against Russia's own inheritance-case registry, other state databases, and a month of obituaries. The rosters list 856 people working at the Central Military District's headquarters and 206 at the 41st Army's headquarters, both current as of July 2025.
That's how an outsider ends up naming Russian war dead when Russia's own government publishes nothing at all.
The rest of this story is for members.
A line of six 2S3 Akatsiya 152-mm howitzers with their crews, stopped at the side of a road, with white recognition markings and Ukrainian flags, March 2015. File photo. OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine · CC BY 2.0
At the time, Denis Pushilin, the head of Russia's occupation administration in Donetsk, said on Telegram that the target was the "Donetsk City" shopping mall. He said eight civilians were wounded — two children, two women and four men. He said nothing about any officers.
Pushilin said the missiles were French-made Storm Shadow/SCALP-EG cruise missiles. Ukraine has used them before on targets deep behind the front line.
But Ukrainian Telegram channels described a different target. One channel said a missile hit a former research site on Ilyich Avenue. Another said six missiles hit a 600-space underground car park beneath an unfinished housing block. Ukrainian OSINT groups said both sites were being used as Russian command posts.
There's a bigger claim out there too, and it isn't confirmed. One Telegram channel said the strikes killed 27 and wounded 58, including two generals among the badly hurt. Mediazona reported that figure as someone else's claim, not its own. Its own confirmed count stays at 20.
And there's a claim that vanished. Meduza reports that a correspondent for the Russian state outlet Izvestia posted that 10 people were killed, then deleted it. That's one source, and nobody can check it now.
Russia's government has put out no official death figures at all. Pushilin only ever talked about the mall and the wounded civilians.
While building its list, Mediazona found two more mass-casualty incidents among the same army's staff officers — eight killed on 4 August this year, and four killed in September last year. Both are separate from the August 26 strike.
Mediazona's running total now puts confirmed Russian military deaths since the invasion at 276,000.
So what don't we know? Whether more officers from this strike are still unidentified. The exact dates and circumstances of the two who died later from their injuries. And whether Russia was specifically targeting this command meeting, or hit several command posts that night as part of one bigger attack.
Nobody has independently checked the higher death toll of 27. And Russia has not responded to Mediazona's findings at all.
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