A senior Russian military officer Lt Gen Vladimir Alexeyev, was shot at and injured in Moscow, reports said. He is currently in hospital but his condition is unknown, nor is it clear who shot him and why.
But since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine over three years ago, the shadow war between the two has steadily escalated with intelligence services on either side targeting civil and military officers and sometimes even their families.
Alexeyev is apparently a Ukrainian who moved to Russia many years ago. He served in the elite Spetsnaz special forces units and later headed intelligence in the Moscow Military District. He last visited Ukraine in Sept 2014 for his mother’s funeral just as the war in the Donbas began.
It would appear that Alexeyev was targeted not only because he is a Ukrainian serving with the Russian military, but as a lesson to other Ukrainians who may have similar ideas. But Alexeyev is not the first and certainly not the last to be targeted.
A detailed report was put out by ACLED, an online data-driven project, says that “Since late 2024, the shadow war has escalated further, both in terms of the number of incidents and the level of seniority of targets assassinated, mostly in Moscow or on its outskirts.
“On 17 December, an explosive planted in a parked e-scooter killed Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov and his adjutant. Kirillov was in charge of Russia’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.”
A week earlier, unidentified perpetrators shot dead Mikhail Shatsky — an engineer who designed navigation systems for Russian missiles and drones. In late December, Russia’s security service claimed to have foiled other assassination attempts on senior defense ministry officials.
It notes that “The number of assassination attempts in Russia in the first three quarters of 2025 has already exceeded the annual figures for the previous three years.”
In April 2025, car bombs killed a senior defense engineer in charge of drone jamming devices and another lieutenant general, Yaroslav Moskalik, who was deputy chief of operations in Russia’s General Staff. Most assassination attempts have been carried out with explosives, including mail bombs.
In 2025, ACLED also records at least two apparent suicide bombings: one that killed Armen Sarkisian, the founder of the Arbat battalion of ethnic Armenians operating in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, and another killing Zaur Gurtsiev, a former officer who led Russia’s aerial bombardment of Mariupol in 2022.
ACLED says that “The evolution of the assassination campaign within Russia — from propaganda mouthpieces to those prosecuting and masterminding the invasion — points to Ukraine’s willingness to go to great lengths to disrupt Russia’s war machine. Not only striking military and oil sites, Ukraine is also hunting down individuals directly involved in the ongoing attempt to conquer Ukraine.
