Senior Russian officer shot in Moscow in apparent assassination attempt

A senior Russian military official has been hospitalised after being shot several times in Moscow, according to state media, quoting Russian officials.

An unknown assailant carried out a gun attack on Lieutenant General Vladimir Alekseyev, deputy chief of Russian military intelligence, in a residential building, Svetlana Petrenko, spokesperson for the Russian Investigative Committee (ICR), said on Friday.

Alekseyev is deputy chief of the Main Directorate of the General Staff at the Ministry of Defence.

Petrenko told reporters that a criminal investigation has been opened for attempted murder and illegal trafficking in firearms regarding the incident, according to the Interfax news agency.

She said that the shooting attack took place in a building at Volokolamsk Highway in Moscow and the suspect fled the scene.

“The victim was hospitalised in one of the city hospitals,” Petrenko said, adding that investigators and forensic experts are currently working at the scene of the incident, reviewing security camera footage and questioning witnesses.

The Kommersant daily, citing law enforcement sources, said Alekseyev’s attacker had been waiting when he left his flat to go to work and that the general had sustained gunshot wounds to an arm, a leg and his chest during a struggle.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused Kyiv, without providing any evidence, of being behind the assassination attempt, claiming that it was designed to sabotage the peace talks on the war in Ukraine.

There has been no comment from Ukraine on the shooting.

The Kremlin said it hoped Alekseyev, who was born in Ukraine when it was still part of the Soviet Union, would survive and recover. Putin has been briefed on the shooting and Russia’s intelligence services are investigating, it said.

“It is clear that military commanders and high-level specialists are at risk during wartime,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.

“But it is not the Kremlin that should be deciding how to ensure their safety. This is a matter for the special services.”

Alekseyev was one of the officials sent to negotiate with the late leader of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who led a rebellion against Moscow in 2023 and was later killed in a plane crash, which many observers blamed on President Vladimir Putin.

Series of assassinations

Al Jazeera’s Yulia Shapovalova, reporting from Moscow, said that there has been a surge of assassinations against Russian high-ranking military officials in Russia, since the start of the war in Ukraine.

“Almost in all those cases, the Ukrainian intelligence services were said to be behind all these assassinations or assassination attempts,” she said.

Since the start of the war in 2022, Ukrainian military intelligence has claimed responsibility for assassinating several senior Russian officers, some of whom have appeared on a public list of Ukraine’s enemies.

The most recent officer to be killed was the head of the General Staff’s army training directorate, Lieutenant General Fanil Sarvarov, who was killed by a bomb under his car on December 22.

Last month, a Russian court sentenced an Uzbek man to life in prison for the 2024 killing of the head of the Russian army’s radiological, chemical and biological defence forces.