A top crony of Russia’s Vladimir Putin has been shot inside his Moscow apartment building by a gunman posing as a food delivery driver.
Lieutenant General Vladimir Alexeyev was on his way to work Friday morning when the attack occurred, with the unidentified assailant apparently lying in wait just inside the building’s entrance, according to local reports. After being shot multiple times, Alexeyev was hospitalized in serious condition, with Russia’s Kommersant newspaper reporting his “vital organs” were struck by a bullet.
Russian authorities have opened a criminal investigation into the attempted murder.
A high-ranking member of the GRU, Russia’s secret military intelligence directorate, Alexeyev is under U.S. sanctions for purportedly overseeing malicious cyberattacks in 2016 designed to boost Trump in that year’s presidential election.
Trump won those polls despite most forecasts favoring his opponent, Hillary Clinton. The MAGA president and his allies have consistently decried allegations of collusion with Russian intelligence figures as a hoax perpetrated by the Democratic Party.
A close confidant of Putin, for whose brutal dictatorial style Trump has repeatedly expressed admiration in the past, Alexeyev is also under E.U. and U.K. sanctions for his role allegedly orchestrating the Salisbury nerve agent poisonings in 2018.
He has faced further international economic measures for his senior role in overseeing Putin’s war on Ukraine, now in its fourth year, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and cost billions in damage to the beleaguered Eastern European country.
Alexeyev—who was also sent to negotiate with late Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin during the mercenary boss’s ill-fated 2023 uprising—is the latest top Russian military official to have been targeted in the Russian capital.
The Kremlin also claims to have thwarted an attack on a top soldier in Russia’s second city of St Petersburg only last month.
Also in January, Russian courts jailed an Uzbek national for the assassination of a general in Moscow. Ukraine has claimed responsibility for that attack.
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