The shot that hit Lieutenant General Vladimir Alekseyev, first deputy head of the GRU, was not just an attack. It was a warning. The attacker waited for him on the steps of a building in the northwest of Moscow, shot, fled and left behind him the question that no Russian general wants to ask: who can get so close to the heart of military intelligence? Alekseyev appears to have survived, but the Russian capital’s sense of invulnerability did not.
The case joins a series of selective attacks against senior officials in Kremlin-controlled territory. Moscow classifies them as crimes and opens investigations, but avoids public conclusions about authorship. In December 2024, General Igor Kirillov, head of the Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defense troops, dies when an explosive device placed in a scooter flares up next to his building in Moscow.
In April 2025: Lieutenant General Yaroslav Moskalik, Deputy Chief of General Staff Operations, was eliminated in a car explosion. December 2025: Lieutenant General Fanil Sarvarov, head of the General Staff’s Operational Training Department, was neutralized by a magnetic bomb. In parallel, Ukrainian attacks on Russian soil are multiplying: drones against refineries, sabotage in warehouses, incursions into border regions such as Kursk. The war stopped being a distant phenomenon and entered the space where Russian power thought it was protected.
The chronology has a turning point. In 2022, Darya Dugina, ultranationalist journalist and daughter of Alexander Dugin, dies when the car she was traveling in explodes on the outskirts of Moscow, near Bolshiye Vyazyomy. The target, according to Russian authorities, would be the father. From then on, the list of deaths and attacks grows. Several officers disappear in circumstances that the State describes as criminal incidents or accidents, but which independent analysts consider compatible with clandestine operations. On the Ukrainian front, dozens of Russian commanders are shot down by precise fire guided by real-time intelligence. The pattern is clear: it is not about combat, but about rearguard action.
The internal impact is corrosive. Generals change routines, hire private security, avoid predictable paths. The FSB, tasked with protecting the military elite, repeatedly fails. Substitutes take on roles without the accumulated experience of those eliminated. The chain of command loses memory, loses confidence, loses sleep. And the doubt arises that no authoritarian regime tolerates: who truly controls the security of the State?
Alekseyev is a heavy target. He is deputy to Igor Kostyukov, leader of the Russian delegation in the discreet talks in Abu Dhabi with Ukrainians and Americans and director of the GRU, the service responsible, among other things, for clandestine operations in Europe. The attack occurs shortly after a negotiating round. In Kiev a story circulates about Kyrylo Budanov, former head of Ukrainian military intelligence and central figure in these operations: when a Russian raises his voice at the table, Budanov asks for his name, repeats it, writes it down. There is no official confirmation, but the likelihood is enough to fuel the myth. And the myth, in psychological warfare, is worth as much as the fact.
The hypothesis of an internal Russian purge is weak. The traditional method of the system is different: discreet poisonings, sudden illnesses, convenient falls. Public attacks with explosives or firearms aim at an external hand. Kiev never claims these attacks, but the combination of controlled visibility, plausible deniability and multiplier impact fits the operational logic attributed to it.
These operations do not change maps, but they change behaviors. Erosion of the military elite, distrust in negotiations, a feeling of deep penetration into an apparatus that was considered impermeable. Abu Dhabi can produce tactical truces, but as long as names are taken and attacks reach Moscow, the Russian General Staff lives with a new and unsettling certainty: the notion that the rearguard has collapsed.
Strategy, Security and Defense Analyst
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