Who Whacked a Top Russian General?
Suspicion for the hit on GRU Gen. Vladimir Alekseyev falls on Ukraine, but murderous Kremlin rivalries can’t be ruled out
AS MOST OF MY READERS KNOW, in a past life I worked in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict (SOLIC), and in the Special Operations Division of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In both roles, I was part of a team responsible for oversight and/or taskings for clandestine support to military operations, covert action and special activities that required a Presidential Finding, i.e. White House authorization.
I’ve dealt with these matters for 35 years.
It is from that perspective that I offer the following observation and assessment of the startling news of an assassination attempt on Lt. Gen. Vladimir Alekseyev, a deputy chief of Russia’s GRU military intelligence service.
Suspicion quickly, and naturally, fell on Ukraine’s special services, which have shown an extraordinary ability to carry out sophisticated assasination and sabotage activities deep inside Russia. But It’s also prudent to acknowledge a possibility that cannot be dismissed in the opaque ecosystem of Russia’s internal power politics: that this attack was state-directed, or at least state-tolerated.
Kremlin Intrigue
In modern Russia, internal violence has repeatedly been used as a tool of discipline, deterrence, and narrative control. The destruction of the aircraft carrying Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, once a close ally of Vladimir Putin before sparking a brief rebellion against the Kremlin’s conduct of the war, stands as a stark reminder of how quickly insiders can become expendable.
Against that backdrop, an attack on a senior intelligence figure cannot be ruled out as part of an internal settling of accounts, a warning to rivals, or a managed purge disguised as foreign aggression. In a system where senior officials and oligarchs seem to “fall” from windows with unsettling regularity, attribution is never just about who pulled the trigger, but about who benefits from the message sent.
Success in war is typically measured by advances on front lines. But you can also measure it by the places no one is supposed to bleed: elevators, stairwells, parking garages and entryways, far from the lines, where the security camera blinks and the doorman looks away. That is where the Russia-Ukraine intelligence war has been living for years—not in trenches or boasts, in the dark arts of clandestine tradecraft.
