Russia says top intelligence official wounded in shooting

Bloomberg News on Feb 6, 2026

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A top Russian military intelligence officer was wounded in an assassination attempt in Moscow, according to the country’s Investigative Committee.

Lieutenant General Vladimir Alekseyev was hospitalized after a gunman fired several shots in a residential building in northwest Moscow on Friday, Russian Investigative Committee spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko said in a statement.

Alekseyev, 64, is first deputy head of the GRU military intelligence agency, a post he has held since 2011. He’s the deputy to GRU chief Igor Kostyukov, who led Russia’s delegation at two days of U.S.-brokered peace talks with top Ukrainian officials in the United Arab Emirates that ended Thursday.

During the June 2023 mutiny led by Wagner Group mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, Alekseyev released a video appeal urging him to halt his advance toward Moscow. Prigozhin later published video showing Alekseyev and Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov in negotiations with Wagner fighters.

Alekseyev was sanctioned by the U.K. in 2020 over his alleged role in organizing the attempted assassination of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal with the toxic nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury in 2018. He’s also under U.S. and European Union sanctions.

President Vladimir Putin has been briefed about the attack, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Friday.

Investigators are examining CCTV footage from the area and interviewing witnesses to try to identify the gunman, Petrenko said.

Top Russian officers linked to the war in Ukraine have been targets of assassination plots in the capital in recent months. Authorities in Moscow have accused Ukraine’s security services of involvement in the attacks.

In December, Lieutenant General Fanil Sarvarov, who was in charge of the operational training department in the Russian General Staff, died from injuries sustained after a bomb planted under his car detonated in Moscow. In April, Major General Yaroslav Moskalik, deputy head of the main operations directorate for Russia’s General Staff, was killed when a car bomb detonated outside an apartment building in the Russian capital.

In December 2024, a bomb planted in a scooter outside a Moscow apartment building killed Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, head of Russia’s radiological, chemical and biological defense forces, and his assistant. The assassination came a day after Ukraine’s SBU security service had accused Kirillov of ordering the “massive use” of banned chemical weapons against Ukrainian troops.