A general of the Russian army staff was killed on Friday near Moscow in the explosion of a car, Russia accusing the Ukrainian secret service of being behind this attack.
This type of attack multiplies in Russia and in the territories of Ukraine which it has occupied since the start of the Russian offensive in February 2022. These assassinations, attributed to or sometimes claimed by Ukraine, aim for soldiers, government officials or even ideological support for Kremlin.
According to the Russian inquiry committee, the victim is General Iaroslav Moskalik, deputy chief of the Operational Directorate of the Russian Armed Forces.
According to this source, the explosion took place near a residential building in the city of Balachikha, located a few kilometers east of Moscow.
“The explosion occurred following the detonation of an improvised explosive device filled with grapeshot,” said the investigation committee.
He then published a video showing a fully calcined vehicle and investigators surrounding a blurred object, presumably the body of the victim, in front of the front door of a building.
Video surveillance images broadcast by the Russian media Izvestia show the powerful explosion of a car, which occurs, projecting fragments in the air, while a person approaches the vehicle.
“There are reasons to believe that the Ukrainian secret services are involved in this murder,” Russian diplomacy spokeswoman Maria Zakharova denounced in a statement.
– Series of targeted attacks –
-“The explosion was very strong, I even had a heartache. It happened at around 10:45 am,” said AFP a resident of the neighborhood, Lioudmila, 50, adding that “a lot of people rushed to look”.
The AFP team saw the bloody body of the victim lying on the ground, near the entrance to a building, then placed in a black bag and evacuated in a truck. Ambulances, firefighters and police were deployed in the area.
Ms. Zakharova described the explosion as “terrorist attack”.
According to the Kremlin website, Iaroslav Moskalik participated in 2015 as a representative of the Russian staff in discussions on the armed conflict in Ukraine then involving Ukrainian and Russian leaders under the aegis of France and Germany.
But according to the Russian investigation media Istories, the general operational management, of which it was part, is today a “key link in the planning of operations in Ukraine”.
Since 2022, kyiv has been accused on several occasions of having carried out targeted attacks against Russian personalities and military leaders in Russia and in the areas occupied by Moscow in Ukraine.
In August 2022, the explosion of a car had killed Daria Douguina, the daughter of the Russian ultra -nationalist ideologist Alexandre Douguine. In April 2023, a Russian military blogger, Maxime Fomine, had lost his life in the detonation of a trapped statuette which had been offered to him in a cafe in Saint Petersburg.
More recently, in December 2024, the Russian Russian, chemical and biological defense commander, Igor Kirillov, was killed by the explosion of an electric scooter trapped in Moscow, an assassination which had been claimed by the Ukrainian security services (SBU).
After this murder, Russian President Vladimir Putin had admitted, rare, a failure of the Russian security services. “We should not allow such flaws,” he said.
