Arya News - Senior Russian intelligence officer, Lt. Gen. Vladimir Alekseyev, was shot multiple times inside his apartment building in the outskirts of Moscow.
Feb. 6 (UPI) -- A senior general in Russia"s military intelligence was seriously wounded Friday after being shot multiple times in a residential building in a district in the northwest of Moscow.
Authorities said they had launched an attempted murder and weapons trafficking investigation after several shots were fired at Lt. Gen. Vladimir Alekseyev by an unknown assailant who then fled the scene.
Alekseyev is in the hospital in a serious condition.
Russian Investigative Committee spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko said investigators and forensic experts from the Moscow branch of the agency were working at the scene gathering evidence, including examining CCTV footage and interviewing witnesses.
Alexseyev, a senior official in the Directorate of the General Staff, or GRU, that runs foreign military intelligence, is under U.S. sanctions for allegedly attempting to interfere in the 2020 presidential election and was sanctioned by Britain over the Salisbury nerve agent attack in 2018.
The 64-year-old, who led intelligence efforts supporting the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, was seen as having a major role in directing Russia"s defense sector and headed negotiations with the Wagner group, Yevgeny Prigozhin"s private army, amid the mercenaries" abortive 2023 bid to oust Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The motive for Friday"s attack is unknown but the attempt on Alexseyev"s life came as his immediate superior, head of the Directorate of the General Staff Igor Kostyukov, was in Abu Dhabi leading the Russian negotiating team in talks with Ukraine and the United States on ending the war.
There have been several assassinations and attempted assassinations of military figures in Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, most recently an attempt to kill a soldier in St. Petersburg In January that was foiled by military intelligence and the killing of Lt. Gen. Fanil Sarvarov, head of the Operational Training Directorate at the General Staff, in a car bombing in December.
In April, Lt. Gen. Yaroslav Moskalik, head of the Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff, was killed by a car bomb as he left his apartment in Balashikha, just east of Moscow. The attack came on the same day U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff was in Moscow for Ukraine peace talks with Putin.
Ignat Kuzin, a 41-year-old resident of Ukraine, appeared in a military court in Moscow in November on charges of preparing an act of terrorism in connection with the attack. However, Russian officials claimed Kuzin planted the device, but that it was detonated remotely from Ukrainian territory.
Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, head of Russia"s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defense Forces, and an aide were killed in a bomb blast outside an apartment building in Moscow in December 2024. An Uzbek man was imprisoned in January 2024 after being convicted of carrying out the attack.
While the Ukrainian security service, or SBU, is usually in the frame for attacks of this type, it almost never comments it did claim responsibility for Kirillov"s killing, which came a day after the SBU charged him with crimes over use of chemical weapons.