KYIV — A senior Russian general, who is deputy head of the GRU, the country’s main foreign military intelligence agency, was shot and severely wounded in an assassination attempt on Friday at his home in Moscow, Russian law enforcement authorities said.
“An unidentified individual fired several shots” at Lt. Gen. Vladimir Alekseyev, the deputy intelligence chief, inside a residential building in northwest Moscow, investigators said. Alekseyev was being treated at a hospital, investigators said, but they did give details of his condition.
The Kremlin immediately blamed Ukraine, which has assassinated several senior Russian military officials since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Russian authorities, however, did not provide evidence and some Russian commentators speculated that Alekseyev had enemies in Russia.
The attack occurred the day after Russian, Ukrainian and U.S. officials concluded two days of talks in Abu Dhabi aimed at halting Russia’s war — with little or no progress.
At the end of the meetings, Washington and Moscow said that they were reestablishing military contact, which had been suspended because of the war. But there was no breakthrough, as Russia continues to demand that Ukraine surrender territory in exchange for a ceasefire.
Moscow’s delegation in Abu Dhabi consisted of military and intelligence officials and was led by Alekseyev’s superior, Adm. Igor Kostyukov, the head of the GRU.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility in the attack on Alekseyev, but Russia quickly pointed at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and accused Kyiv of seeking to disrupt the talks in Abu Dhabi.
“The attack against Lieutenant General Alekseyev confirmed the Zelensky regime’s intention to disrupt the negotiations,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.
Though Ukraine’s security services have waged a multiyear campaign of assassinations and other attacks against Kremlin insiders, current and former Western security officials said there were reasons to question whether Ukraine was behind the shooting of Alekseyev.
Targeting him at a time when his superior, Kostyukov, was taking part in U.S.-led negotiations to end the war could risk derailing those talks and angering the Trump administration, officials said.
Ukraine’s security services “have done these hits in the past but it would be pretty crazy of them to do it now,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official.
The former official also noted the involvement in those negotiations of Kyrylo Budanov – the former head of Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate and now Zelensky’s chief of staff — raising the stakes for Kyiv if Budanov’s former agency was shown to be linked to the attempted assassination.
“We are not stupid, believe me,” said a former senior Ukraine security official who worked closely with Budanov.
The former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information, said it was “much more likely” that the attempt on Alekseyev was related to a “domestic issue” including the general’s role in quelling a 2023 uprising of Wagner Group, the powerful Russian paramilitary force.
Alekseyev was directly involved in putting down that rebellion, and appeared on video footage meeting with Wagner leader Yevgeniy Prigozhin before he died in a plane crash widely suspected of being orchestrated by Russia’s intelligence services.
Some Russian commentators speculated that Alekseyev may have been targeted by rivals or enemies in Russia and that disrupting the already faltering ceasefire negotiations, as Lavrov suggested, was an unlikely motive.
“Let’s be honest, the negotiations are already going without any visible results; there’s clearly nothing to disrupt,” one Russia Telegram channel, called Provisional Governor 2, posted Friday.
Alekseyev’s tenure as a senior GRU official overlaps with notorious operations linked to the agency, including the hacking of Democratic National Committee computers before the 2016 U.S. presidential election; the poisoning of Russian defector Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England; and GRU operations in Syria.
Ukraine’s intelligence services have taken responsibility for some of the numerous attacks on Russian commanders far from the front lines, including in the Russian capital.
Ukraine’s security services have mounted a series of lethal attacks on Russian military leaders and Kremlin insiders since the 2022 Russian invasion, according to Western and Ukrainian security officials.
At least three other senior military officials were also killed in explosions near the homes in Russia: Fanil Sarvarov, head of the General Staff’s Operational Training Department; Yaroslav Moskalik, deputy head of the General Staff’s Operational Department; and Igor Kirillov, chief of Russia’s nuclear, biological and chemical defense forces, who died when a bomb hidden in an electric scooter exploded outside his apartment building in December 2024.
A Ukrainian official later said that Kyiv’s intelligence service was responsible for the attack on Kirillov, calling him a “legitimate target” because he ordered the use of banned chemical weapons on Ukraine.
In 2023, former Russian submarine commander Stanislav Rzhitsky was shot in the chest and back while jogging park in Krasnodar, an assassination linked to Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence service and Rzhitsky’s use of a fitness app that mapped his regular running routes.
That same year, Ukraine’s internal security service, the SBU, orchestrated a car bombing that killed the daughter of Alexander Dugin, a far-right Russian political ideologue who advocated the destruction of Ukraine as a sovereign country, according to Ukrainian and Western security officials.
Miller reported from London and Abbakumova from Riga, Latvia.
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