The deputy head of Russian military intelligence has been hospitalised in Moscow after an assassination attempt.
Lieutenant General Vladimir Alekseyev of the GRU was shot several times in an apartment block by an unidentified attacker who then fled, the Investigative Committee said.
Investigators are studying CCTV from the area on Volokolamskoye Boulevard in the northwest of the capital.
The scene where Alekseyev was shot
“Investigative actions and operational search measures are being carried out to identify the person or persons involved in committing the aforementioned crime,” Svetlana Petrenko, the Investigative Committee spokesperson, said.
A series of high-ranking Russian officers have been killed or wounded by allegedly Ukrainian assassins working on the orders of Kyiv’s security services.
Sources told Russia’s Kommersant newspaper that the assassination attempt had taken place at about 7am local time as Alekseyev, 64, left his apartment to go to work.
According to the report, his driver was waiting for him on the street with his car but Alekseyev was met on the stairs by his assailant, a man who had apparently gained entry to the building by pretending to be a food deliverer.
The assailant shot him in the arm and the leg, and when Alekseyev tried to wrestle the pistol from him, the officer received a third shot to the chest.
Alekseyev’s resistance had prevented him being killed, one of the sources claimed.
Russian apartment blocks typically have an entry phone system which allows people making deliveries to call apartments and speak to their inhabitants.
Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, called the attack a terrorist act, and said it “confirms once more the focus of Zelensky’s regime on provocations designed to disrupt the negotiation process” over the war in Ukraine.
“[This is] a regime prepared to do anything to persuade its western sponsors not to leave the US alone in their attempt to distract the [US] from the course towards a just settlement,” he said.
Lavrov accuses Ukraine of assassination attempt
Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, said the president was being kept informed of developments. “The special services are doing their work,” he said. “We wish the general, first of all, to survive and get better. We hope that will be the case.”
Peskov added: “The fact that such military leaders and highly-qualified specialists are under threat during time of war is indisputable. But it is not for the Kremlin to deliberate how to provide them security. That is a question for the special services.”
Alekseyev, who was born in what is now Ukraine, has held his post since 2011. Local media described him as one of the main people in charge of Russian volunteer forces fighting in Ukraine.
In 2023, alongside Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, the deputy minister of defence, he took part in negotiations with the militia leader and Putin associate Yevgeny Prigozhin when the latter led an uprising because of his disillusionment with army top brass.
Alekseyev was sanctioned by the US in 2016 in connection with Russian cyber attempts to skew the US presidential election in favour of President Trump.
He was also placed under European Union sanctions after the GRU was accused of being behind the 2018 nerve agent attack on the MI6 double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in the UK.
Ukrainian military intelligence has said it believes that Alekseyev has been responsible for coordinating airstrikes on Ukrainian territory, and for organising referendums on Russian-held territory in Ukraine in an attempt to legitimise their occupation.
Alekseyev was awarded the title Hero of the Russian Federation for his involvement in the Russian military intervention in the Syrian civil war.