Russian general Vladimir Alekseyev in critical condition after Moscow shooting

Deputy director of Russia’s military intelligence agency shot several times in the stairwell of his apartment

A top Russian military official who plays a major role in the country’s intelligence services has been taken to hospital after being shot in Moscow, state media has reported.

Lt Gen Vladimir Alekseyev was shot several times on the stairwell of his apartment on Friday by an unknown gunman in the north-west of the city and is in critical condition, according to reports.

Oleg Tsaryov, a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian figure close to Alekseyev said the general had undergone surgery and remained in a coma.

No party has claimed responsibility for shooting Alekseyev, but suspicion in Moscow fell on Kyiv. Ukrainian intelligence agencies have targeted dozens of Russian military officers and Russian-installed officials since the start of the war, accusing them of involvement in war crimes.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, called the shooting a “terrorist attack”, claiming without evidence it was intended to derail talks between Russia, Ukraine and the US to end the war. “This terrorist attack once again confirmed the Zelenskyy regime’s focus on constant provocations, aimed in turn at derailing the negotiation process,” Lavrov said in Moscow.

The Ukrainian-born Alekseyev is a deputy director of Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, a unit in the defence ministry known for organising covert operations abroad, including assassinations, sabotage and espionage.

He was one of the top officers providing Vladimir Putin with intelligence for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

He has also been widely described as a major figure overseeing the country’s private military companies and was among the senior officials dispatched to negotiate with Yevgeny Prigozhin during the Wagner group’s brief mutiny in the summer of 2023.

After Prigozhin’s revolt, Alekseyev was widely believed to have fallen out of favour in Moscow and was reported to have been briefly detained over his links to Wagner, yet he ultimately retained his post.s.

Alekseyev is under sanctions from Washington for his alleged involvement in efforts to interfere in the 2020 US presidential election. The UK also placed sanctions on him over the deadly 2018 novichok nerve agent attack in Salisbury.

Without explicitly claiming responsibility, Denys Prokopenko, the commander of Ukraine’s Azov regiment, wrote on X that if Alekseyev survived the attack, he would “never sleep peacefully again”.

“No war criminal who has killed and tortured Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, destroyed Ukrainian cities, abducted Ukrainian children, or committed other crimes against the Ukrainian people will ever feel safe,” Prokopenko added.

The timing of the shooting was striking, coming a day after Russian and Ukrainian delegations – including Alekseyev’s direct superior, Igor Kostyukov – met in Abu Dhabi, where both sides spoke of apparent progress in the peace talks.

Previous peace efforts have broken down over Russia’s maximalist territorial demands on Ukraine, with Moscow repeatedly rejecting Kyiv’s calls for an immediate ceasefire.

Ukraine has targeted at least three Russian generals in the Moscow region over the past year, though such operations have typically involved explosives.

Little is publicly known about the clandestine networks believed to be behind assassinations and attacks on military infrastructure inside Russia and in Russian-controlled territories.

Alekseyev’s shooting will be seen as the latest failure of Russia’s security services to protect senior military personnel deep inside the country. While details of who carried out the attack and how it was organised remain unclear, Russian military bloggers have criticised apparent security lapses, questioning how a gunman was able to enter the apartment building undetected.

Andrei Soldatov, an independent expert on Russia’s security services, called the attack “incredible sloppiness”. “One would have expected them to scale up protection for top military brass,” he wrote on social media.