A deputy chief of Russia’s military intelligence agency, known as the GRU, was shot and wounded in Moscow on Friday, Russian officials said, in an attack that came amid renewed diplomacy over the war in Ukraine.
Investigative Committee spokesperson Svetlana Petrenko said in a statement that Lt. Gen. Vladimir Alekseyev was hospitalized after being shot several times by an unidentified assailant at an apartment building in northwestern Moscow. She did not identify potential suspects or say who might be behind the attack.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said President Vladimir Putin was informed about the shooting. Peskov added that law enforcement agencies need to step up protection of senior military officers during the conflict in Ukraine.
The attack also followed two days of talks in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, involving Russian, Ukrainian and U.S. negotiators, aimed at ending what both sides have described as nearly four years of fighting. Russian officials said the Russian delegation was led by Alekseyev’s boss, military intelligence chief Adm. Igor Kostyukov, and the negotiations wrapped up the day before the shooting was reported.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the investigation would be carried out by law enforcement agencies, but he described the attack as an apparent “terrorist act” by Ukraine intended to derail peace talks. Ukrainian authorities, meanwhile, had not publicly commented on the attack at the time of the report.
Alekseyev, 64, served as first deputy head of the GRU. Russia said he has held the post since 2011 and was decorated with the Hero of Russia medal for his role in Moscow’s military campaign in Syria. In June 2023, he appeared on state television speaking to Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin during Prigozhin’s short-lived mutiny that seized a military headquarters in Rostov-on-Don.
Russia also has a record of attributing previous killings of senior military figures to Ukraine, while Ukraine has claimed responsibility for some of those attacks. In December, a car bomb killed Lt. Gen. Fanil Sarvarov, head of the Operational Training Directorate of the Russian Armed Forces’ General Staff; in April, Lt. Gen. Yaroslav Moskalik, a deputy head of the main operational department in the General Staff, was killed by a bomb placed in his car parked near his apartment outside Moscow. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in April that he received a report from the head of Ukraine’s foreign intelligence agency on the “liquidation” of top Russian military figures, adding that “justice inevitably comes,” without naming Moskalik.
In December 2024, Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the chief of the military’s nuclear, biological and chemical protection forces, was killed by a bomb hidden on an electric scooter outside his apartment building, according to Russian reporting. Ukraine’s security service claimed responsibility for that attack, the report said.
Russian business daily Kommersant said the attacker posed as a delivery person and shot Alekseyev twice in the stairway of the apartment building, wounding him in the foot and the arm. Kommersant reported that Alekseyev tried to wrest away the gun and was shot again in the chest before the attacker fled. The report did not identify the assailant.
The report also described a separate criminal development involving the investigation: a Russian man who previously lived in Ukraine pleaded guilty to carrying out the attack, saying he had been paid by Ukraine’s security services.