Putin's fresh purge: Russian leader fires FIVE generals and a police colonel from military top brass as Kremlin says it will not stop war 'until all goals are achieved'

• Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin has fired five generals and a police colonel 
• Tens of thousands of Russian troops have been killed so far in the war in Ukraine
• Putin dismissed Major Generals Alexander Laas, Andrey Lipilin, Alexander Udovenko and Yuri Instrankin as well as Major General of Police Vasily Kukushkin
• The Kremlin says it will press on with its war in Ukraine until its goals are met

By CHRIS MATTHEWS FOR MAILONLINE-3 June 2022 

Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin has fired five generals and a police colonel as his military continued to suffer massive losses, it has been reported.

Tens of thousands of Russian troops have been killed and Moscow has failed in its bid to capture Kyiv, instead now focusing on the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine.

This week, Putin is said to have fired five of his top brass as he dismissed Major Generals Alexander Laas, Andrey Lipilin, Alexander Udovenko and Yuri Instrankin as well as Major General of Police Vasily Kukushkin.

It came as the Kremlin says it will press on with its military operations in Ukraine until its goals are met.

Asked how the Kremlin views progress in Ukraine 100 days into the war on Friday, Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russian troops have succeeded in their main task of protecting civilians in areas on Ukraine's east controlled by Moscow-backed separatists.

Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin (pictured today) has fired five generals and a police colonel as his military continued to suffer massive losses

Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov (pictured) said Russian troops have succeeded in their main task of protecting civilians in areas on Ukraine's east controlled by Moscow-backed separatists (File image)

Peskov said that Russian forces have 'liberated' many areas in Ukraine from the 'pro-Nazi' Ukrainian military and nationalist units, adding that 'this work will continue until all the goals of the special military operation are achieved.'

Speaking during a conference call with reporters, Peskov was evasive when asked whether Russian authorities are planning to hold referendums in those areas to join Russia, saying that it will depend on how the situation evolves. Peskov and other Russian officials have said repeatedly that it will be up to the residents of those regions to determine their status.

Britain's Ministry of Defence (MoD) said: 'Russia's assault into northern Ukraine ended in a costly failure.

'Russia failed to implement its own principles of war.

'With the limited combat readiness of many units, it spread its forces too thinly without enough support from artillery and combat aircraft.

'Above all, it was based on wildly optimistic assessments about the welcome Russian troops would receive in Ukraine.

'Russia has now adopted a 'strategy of attrition' and is achieving slow and costly gains in the Donbas.'

It's not the first time Putin has sacked his top generals. 

Vladimir Putin previously fired eight generals and was said to be raging at his FSB secret service over the failures during early fighting in Ukraine (File image)

In March the deranged despot was said to be 'raging' at the FSB after failed intelligence and poor strategy saw his troops handed a series of embarrassing defeats in the opening days of the war in Ukraine. 

At the time, Ukrainian security council chief Oleksiy Danilov said 'around eight' Russian commanders had been fired since the start of the conflict as Moscow scrambled to change strategy after its attempted 'shock and awe' blitz fell flat.

Putin was also said to be infuriated with commanders of the FSB security service - which he used to run - for handing him intelligence suggesting that Ukraine was weak, riddled with neo-Nazi groups, and would give up easily if attacked.

Meanwhile it has now been 100 days since Russian tanks rolled across the border and into neighbouring Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

A torrent of gut-wrenching images and clips have emerged since that fateful day: Civilian corpses in the streets of Bucha; a blown-up theatre in Mariupol; the chaos at a Kramatorsk train station in the wake of a Russian missile strike, to name a few.

But those images tell just a small part of the overall picture of Europe's worst armed conflict since World War II. 

More than 100,000 Russian troops massed on Ukraine's borders in the days leading up to February 24, but many analysts and commentators dismissed the notion that Russia would launch a full scale invasion into its European neighbour.

Those who did predict such a conflict warned Putin's troops, superior in numbers and equipment, would sweep to victory in a matter of days. 

More than three months later and Ukraine's armed forces, driven by a duty to protect their homeland and reinforced by Western supplies and weaponry, have successfully repelled Russia's soldiers from Kyiv and are still fighting their invaders fiercely throughout the Donbas.  

Destroyed military equipment of the Russian army in the city of Bucha close to the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv

The body of a serviceman is coated in snow next to a destroyed Russian military multiple rocket launcher vehicle on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraine, on Feb. 25, 2022

An explosion tears a hole in the side of an apartment building after a Russian tank fired a rocket in Mariupol, Ukraine, on March 11, 2022

In this photo taken on April 02, 2022 bodies of civilians lie on Yablunska street in Bucha, northwest of Kyiv, after Russian army pull back from the city

A view shows the building of a theatre destroyed in the course of Ukraine-Russia conflict, as a word 'children' in Russian is written in large white letters on the pavement, in the southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine April 10, 2022

The remains of a large rocket with the words 'for our children' in Russian is pictured next to the main building of a train station in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, that was hit by a rocket attack killing at least 35 people, on April 8, 2022

Russian state media, which from the beginning portrayed the conflict as a 'special military operation' designed to 'demilitarise and de-nazify' Ukraine, was asked by Putin's administration ahead of the 100th day of war 'not to propagate the theme of the operation' and 'not to draw attention to its duration', multiple sources told Russian-Latvian news organisation Meduza.

Britain's MoD said that Putin's forces 'failed to achieve their initial objectives to seize Kyiv and Ukrainian centres of government' and declared 'in order for Russia to achieve any form of success will require continued huge investment of manpower and equipment and is likely to take considerable further time.'

And Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declared today: 'Victory will be ours,' vowing to expel the Russians from the Donbas region altogether.

Yet the armed conflict has wrought utter havoc and Russia's painstakingly slow but steady progress in seizing more land in eastern Ukraine means there is no end in sight. 

Mariana Vishegirskaya stands outside a maternity hospital that was damaged by shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 9, 2022

Bodies of civilians in plastic bags lay in a mass grave in Bucha city, which was the recaptured by the Ukrainian army, Kyiv (Kiev) area, Ukraine, 04 April 2022. More than 410 bodies of killed civilians were carried from the recaptured territory in Kyiv's area for exgumation and expert examination

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks to the press in the town of Bucha, northwest of the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, after seeing scores of corpses of Ukrainian civilians slaughtered by withdrawing Russian troops

A woman learns how to use an AK-47 assault rifle during a civilians self-defence course in the outskirts of Lviv, western Ukraine, on March 4, 2022

A woman reacts as she stands in front of a house burning after being shelled in the city of Irpin, outside Kyiv, on March 4, 2022

A man with his bicycle walks between debris outside the destroyed Retroville shopping mall in a residential district, after a Russian attack on the Ukranian capital Kyiv on March 21, 2022

A view of the city of Mariupol on June 2, 2022, amid the ongoing Russian military action in Ukraine

Nobody knows how many combatants or civilians have died, and claims of casualties by government officials and armed forces staff - who are likely to be exaggerating or lowballing their figures in an attempt to favourably shape the narrative of the conflict - are all but impossible to verify.

Foreign government officials, U.N. agencies and independent organisations who carry out the grim task of counting the dead are unable to gain access to many places where people have been killed.

And the Kremlin has released scant information about casualties among its forces and allies, giving no account of civilian deaths in areas under its control. 

But even with all those caveats, 'at least tens of thousands' of Ukrainian civilians have died so far, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday in comments to Luxembourg's parliament.

Mayor of Mariupol Vadym Boichenko recently estimated more than 21,000 civilians had died in his city alone after suffering months of constant bombardment, brutality at the hands of Russian occupiers and drastically reduced supplies of food and water.

Severodonetsk, a city in the eastern region of Luhansk that has become the focus of Russia's offensive, has seen roughly 1,500 civilian casualties just in the past few weeks of fighting, according to the city administration chief Oleksandr Striuk.

Ukraine's Armed Forces have not released a death toll for its servicemen and women, but Zelensky said this week that 60 to 100 Ukrainian soldiers are dying every day along the eastern front amid bitter close-quarter fighting in urban centres, with about 500 more wounded.

The Kremlin has only once released official figures for troop deaths, when a general told state media on March 25 that 1,351 soldiers had been killed and 3,825 wounded.

But the Land Forces of Ukraine, which have kept a running tally of Russian losses throughout the war, say more than 30,000 of Putin's soldiers have been killed so far, while Western estimates given in late April put the number at more than 15,000. 

Zelensky declared recently that Moscow has lost 'more troops in three months than the Soviet Union lost in 10 years of the war in Afghanistan' - more than 15,000 Soviets were killed between 1979-1989. 

Speaking on condition of anonymity Wednesday to discuss intelligence matters, a Western official said Russia is 'still taking casualties, but in smaller numbers.' The official estimated that some 40,000 Russian troops have been wounded.