Wikipedia gives 1,107 Russian generals for the year 2008. Seven might be high in the sense that usually militaries conduct their operations in a way to avoid generals dying but it's a rounding error when estimating the total amount of generals that Russia currently has.
Locating and targeting generals in real-time is probably easier now than it was at any point during the 20th century, so a top-heavy command structure makes sense.
Russian army has very many non-battle units. For example, Logistical Support. This units have own generals too.
Even military band conductor can be a general in Russia.
Zvi claims a total of 20 Russian generals in Ukraine here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/C2Njf7NutyiYxGsxq/ukraine-post-5-bits-of-information#Military_Situation
We don’t know how many Russian generals are in Ukraine. Russia has not made that information public.
What you can look at is data from past wars. Twelve US generals were killed in Vietnam over a period of idk how many years.
Vietnam casualties by rank: http://www.americanwarlibrary.com/vietnam/vwc4.htm A major Russian general is equivalent in rank to a US brigade general (grade 07 in the first table).
The frequency of Russian generals who have died over the period of one month seems unusually high in comparison. FWIW Russia’s military is said to have a top-heavy org structure.
In an interview retired US 4-star general Barry McAffry said that the fact that many Russian generals have been killed is a bad sign on net for the Ukrainian cause because it is evidence of a strong will to win in those generals.
Interesting take! My gut reaction is that sounds more like contrarianism for contrarianism's sake than a thought-through opinion, as I wouldn't expect the generals to have much choice in where they're located unless we were expecting them to disobey superiors when their lives are at risk. I might be missing out on some important context, though.
The numbers look comparable to the upper echelon losses in the first few weeks of the German invasion of Russia during WWII, which is quite telling. On the other hand, it only takes one Zhukov to turn things around.
I’ve come across a large number of articles talking about the unprecedented number of generals (7) killed so far during the current war (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/26/ukraine-russan-generals-dead/ for instance), but I can’t easily find information online about how many generals Russia actually has. Without a sense of how common and how crucial generals are in the Russian military, it’s hard to make any particular update on the situation. The way that the news has been worded suggests that seven is a high percentage in this context, but considering the level of positive propaganda from the media, I’m not sure I should put any trust into the framing here. If anyone could share further information about the number/strategic importance of Russian generals, it would be greatly appreciated.