A senior Russian military intelligence general has been gunned down in a brazen attack in the heart of the capital, exposing the vulnerability of Moscow’s security elite and raising immediate questions about a new wave of internal warfare.
Lieutenant General Vladimir Alexeyev, the deputy head of the GRU’s Main Directorate, was shot several times on Friday morning outside a residential building on Moscow’s Volokolamsk Highway. The assailant fled the scene, leaving the high-ranking officer wounded and prompting a major investigation.
A “Sanctioned” Target in the Shadows of War
Alexeyev is not just any general. He is a key figure in the GRU, an intelligence service accused by the UK and EU of orchestrating the 2018 Novichok nerve agent attack in Salisbury, for which he was personally sanctioned. His shooting marks him as the latest in a string of high-ranking Russian military figures targeted since the invasion of Ukraine, pointing to a pattern of violence bleeding from the front lines back to Moscow’s doorstep.
According to Russia’s Investigative Committee spokesperson Svetlana Petrenko, Alexeyev was immediately hospitalized, but his condition remains unknown. The Kremlin, through spokesman Dmitry Peskov, stated President Vladimir Putin was being briefed, adding, “We wish first of all that the general survives and recovers.”
From Mariupol to Mutiny: A Controversial Operator
The general’s career underscores why his targeting is significant. During the war, Alexeyev played an operational role, participating in talks with Ukrainian forces during the brutal siege of Mariupol. He was also dispatched as an emissary to negotiate with the late Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin during his short-lived mutiny in June 2023—a role that placed him at the center of one of the Kremlin’s most severe internal crises.
His boss, GRU chief Igor Kostyukov, currently leads Russia’s security negotiations with the US and Ukraine. Alexeyev’s attack occurs against this backdrop of clandestine diplomacy and shadow war.
A Capital Under Silent Siege
While Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov swiftly pointed the finger at Ukraine—a claim Kyiv has not commented on—the attack fits a grim pattern of assassinations that have gone unanswered within Russia’s security perimeter.
In January, an Uzbek national was jailed for the 2024 car-bomb killing of Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, head of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection troops—an attack Ukraine’s SBU intelligence service claimed responsibility for. Just last December, another GRU lieutenant general, Fanil Sarvarov, was killed by an explosive device planted under his car in Moscow.
The message of these attacks is unambiguous: even the architects and commanders of Russia’s war are not safe at home. Currently, investigators are scouring CCTV and interviewing witnesses to gather leads on the perpetrator of this crime.
