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.
spies are probably easier to place and activate than in the 1960s
If by spies you mean intelligence officers, they are not. Facial recognition and simple internet checkups make passable fake identities pretty much impossible to do well. People generate too much data about themselves in 2022 to be “engineered” without herculean effort. When intelligence officers have to travel to a foreign country, nowadays they need to do so by using their actual identity and fitting an extensive cover story into that. If you posted something like “man I can’t wait to join the CIA” on your facebook page when you were 16 then you’re probably out of luck. More than one SOF/CIA officer has been stopped at customs after a long planning period because their hometown newspaper quoted them as wanting to be a SEAL when they grew up.
It is true that spies (as in the people being blackmailed) can send information more conveniently nowadays due to the internet, but it’s still risky for them to do so. They can’t use traditional tradecraft like TAILS because just using things like that is too suspicious. So the CIA or whatever intelligence agency has to make some innocuous purpose-built websites for infodumps and hope that either no one is monitoring this high level government employee’s cell phone or they aren’t looking closely.
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.
If by spies you mean intelligence officers, they are not. Facial recognition and simple internet checkups make passable fake identities pretty much impossible to do well. People generate too much data about themselves in 2022 to be “engineered” without herculean effort. When intelligence officers have to travel to a foreign country, nowadays they need to do so by using their actual identity and fitting an extensive cover story into that. If you posted something like “man I can’t wait to join the CIA” on your facebook page when you were 16 then you’re probably out of luck. More than one SOF/CIA officer has been stopped at customs after a long planning period because their hometown newspaper quoted them as wanting to be a SEAL when they grew up.
It is true that spies (as in the people being blackmailed) can send information more conveniently nowadays due to the internet, but it’s still risky for them to do so. They can’t use traditional tradecraft like TAILS because just using things like that is too suspicious. So the CIA or whatever intelligence agency has to make some innocuous purpose-built websites for infodumps and hope that either no one is monitoring this high level government employee’s cell phone or they aren’t looking closely.