The No. 2 officer at the Russian military intelligence agency known as GRU was shot and wounded in Moscow, in what investigators called an assassination attempt.
Lieutenant General Vladimir Alekseyev, 65, was hospitalized early on February 6 after being shot several times, including in the back, the Investigative Committee said in a statement. He was hospitalized in critical condition.
The shooter fled the scene, the committee said.
The newspaper Kommersant reported that investigators believe Alekseyev was shot twice by a person posing as a food delivery courier who had entered his apartment building. The newspaper said Alekseyev, who was on his way to work, was shot twice in the building’s stairwell and then a third time as he fended off the attack, after which the shooter fled the scene.
Alekseyev is deputy commander of the GRU, the Defense Ministry’s intelligence agency that is known for audacious operations ranging from sabotage, assassination, espionage, and cyberattacks.
Alekseyev has been implicated by Britain in the 2018 near-fatal Novichok poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Britain. A British woman died after being inadvertently exposed to the poison.
He’s also been linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, a St. Petersburg restaurateur who co-founded Russia’s most notorious mercenary company, Wagner Group. Prigozhin died in a plane crash in August 2023, which Western intelligence officials later concluded was an assassination.
The US Treasury Department hit Alekseyev and other GRU officers with financial sanctions for hacking US political parties and other cyberespionage operations.
If confirmed Alekseyev was the target of an assassination attempt, it would be the latest in a series of attacks on top Russian military officials — many in Moscow.
Suspicion for the attacks has fallen in large part on Ukrainian intelligence agencies, which have pulled off their own audacious sabotage and assassination operations inside of Russia in recent years.
In December, the head of the General Staff’s operational training directorate, Lieutenant General Fanil Sarvarov, died after a bomb exploded under his car on Moscow’s outskirts.
Eight months prior, another lieutenant general, Yaroslav Moskalik, a deputy chief in the General Staff’s operation directorate, was killed in a car bombing outside Mocsow.
And in 2024, the officer in charge of Russia’s nuclear and chemical weapons protection forces, was killed when an electric scooter exploded on the sidewalk outside his Moscow apartment building.
