Arya News - A senior Russian general has been shot in an apartment in Moscow.
A senior Russian general has been shot in an apartment in Moscow.
“Several shots” were fired at Lt Gen Vladimir Alekseyev on Friday morning, according to Moscow’s investigative committee, in the latest assassination attempt of a top military figure involved in the war in Ukraine .
The agency said in a statement that the general had been taken to hospital and the suspect remained unidentified.
A career military officer, Lt Gen Alekseyev is the first deputy chief of the Russian general staff, according to an online biography.
He led intelligence operations during the Russian intervention in Syria to support Bashar al-Assad , the now-ousted leader.
Lt Gen Alekseyev was also dispatched to negotiate with Yevgeny Prigozhin , the former leader of the Wagner group, during his attempted coup against Vladimir Putin in 2023.
Svetlana Petrenko, an investigative committee spokesman, said in a statement: “Investigative actions and operational search measures are being carried out to identify the person or persons involved in committing the aforementioned crime.”
Several high-ranking military officials have been killed since Putin started Russia’s full-scale offensive on Ukraine in February 2022. Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for this attempted assassination.
Last month, a Russian court sentenced an Uzbek man to life in prison for the 2024 killing of Igor Kirillov , the head of the Russian army’s radiological, chemical and biological defence forces.
The Russian general was killed when a booby-trapped scooter exploded as he left an apartment block in Moscow, in an attack Kyiv said it had orchestrated.
Ukraine has claimed responsibility for a number of attacks inside Russia , including the assassination of Lt Gen Fanil Sarvarov in a car bomb in Moscow in December.
Research by Acled, a global conflict monitor, shows that Ukraine is winning what is described as an escalating shadow war.
The pace and reach of Ukraine’s assassination campaign has overtaken Russia’s by some margin, with late 2024 marking a turning point, data show. In the first eight months of 2025, the number of assassination attempts by Ukraine in Russia had already exceeded the annual totals for 2022, 2023 and 2024.
Days before Kirillov’s killing, Mikhail Shatsky, an engineer involved in missile and drone production, was shot dead.
In April 2025, car bombs killed two senior figures linked to electronic warfare and operational planning, including Gen Yaroslav Moskalik, a key figure in the Russian general staff.
Yaroslav Moskalik was one of two senior figures killed by a car bomb in Moscow - Shutterstock /Yuri Kochetkov
Russia has attempted to respond in kind. Acled noted at least nine Russian assassination attempts between 2023 and August 2025, though many were poorly executed and reliant on local proxies.
In July 2025, Col Ivan Voronych of Ukraine’s security service was shot dead in Kyiv. A far-Right group with suspected Russian links claimed responsibility.
Nichita Gurcov, senior analyst at Acled, told The Telegraph: “The duel of assassinations… is happening in parallel with the unravelling rules of engagement in conventional warfare, exemplified by indiscriminate targeting of civilians and mistreatment or executions of prisoners of war.
“Unrestricted by the confines of the battlefield, this practice may become a self-sustaining spiral of violence, taking a dangerous shortcut from due process and leaving no exoneration options to victims.”
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