In a piece on Dec. 17, in an attempt to highlight how Putin has “failed” in Ukraine, the New York Times covered the incident: “The United States tried to stop Ukraine from killing a top Russian general. American officials found out that [Russia’s Chief of General Staff] Gen. Valery Gerasimov was planning a trip to the front lines, but withheld the information from the Ukrainians, worried that an attempt on his life could lead to a war between the United States and Russia. The Ukrainians learned of the trip anyway. After an internal debate, Washington took the extraordinary step of asking Ukraine to call off an attack—only to be told that the Ukrainians had already launched it. Dozens of Russian soldiers were said to have been killed. General Gerasimov wasn’t one of them.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/17/world/europe/russia-war-putin-facts.html?searchResultPosition=1 )
RT covered the comments of Oleksiy Arestovych, a senior aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in a YouTube interview with anti-Putin Russian activist Mark Feygin on Dec. 18, in which he confirmed that Ukrainians had learned of the Gerasimov’s trip to the front lines in April through their own channels, and shelled the positions where Gerasimov was thought to have been, but left him unharmed by the strike. “Let’s uncover a terrible mystery. Gerasimov was in Izium and we fired at Gerasimov. It happened,” said Arestovych in the interview. Feygin himself is on record in the Odessa Journal of Nov. 11, calling for a violent overthrow of the Putin government. (https://www.rt.com/russia/568440-gerasimov-ukraine-arestovich-us/ )
