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Authorities in Dubai have arrested and handed over to Russia a man suspected of shooting and wounding a senior officer in Russia’s intelligence services, according to Moscow’s security service.
The announcement on Sunday came two days after a gunman shot Lt Gen Vladimir Alekseyev three times on the stairwell of his Moscow apartment, leaving him in a critical condition.
A Russian citizen in his 60s named as Lyubomir Korba was arrested after fleeing to the United Arab Emirates and handed over to Russia, said Russian media, citing the Federal Security Service (FSB).
Television images showed masked FSB officers escorting a blindfolded man from a small jet in Russia in the dark. A suspected accomplice had been arrested in Moscow and another escaped to Ukraine, the reports added.
Investigators said Ukrainian intelligence agents had tasked Korba, born in the Ternopil region of Soviet Ukraine in 1960, with carrying out Friday’s shooting, which was done with a Makarov pistol equipped with a silencer at an apartment complex seven miles north of the Kremlin.
No party has claimed responsibility for the attack on Alekseyev, 64, but Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, called it a “terrorist attack” and claimed without evidence that it had been intended to derail talks between Russia, Ukraine and the US to end the war.
Ukrainian intelligence agencies have targeted dozens of Russian military officers and Russian-installed officials since the start of the war, accusing them of involvement in war crimes. However, Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, said Ukraine had had nothing to do with the shooting of Aleseyev and suggested it was the result of Russian “in-fighting”.
The Ukrainian-born Alekseyev is a deputy director of Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, a unit in the defence ministry known for organising covert operations abroad, including assassinations, sabotage and espionage.
He was one of the top officers providing Vladimir Putin with intelligence for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. He has been widely described as a major figure overseeing the country’s private military companies and was among the senior officials dispatched to negotiate with Yevgeny Prigozhin during the Wagner group’s brief mutiny in the summer of 2023.
After Prigozhin’s revolt, Alekseyev was widely believed to have fallen out of favour in Moscow and was reported to have been briefly detained over his links to Wagner, yet he ultimately retained his post.
The lieutenant general is under sanctions from Washington for his alleged involvement in efforts to interfere in the 2020 US presidential election. The UK also placed sanctions on him over the deadly 2018 novichok nerve agent attack in Salisbury.
Moscow has shared few details of Aleksevey’s condition since he was taken to hospital.
The commander of Ukraine’s Azov regiment, Denys Prokopenko, wrote on X that if Alekseyev survived, he would never sleep peacefully again. “No war criminal who has killed and tortured Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, destroyed Ukrainian cities, abducted Ukrainian children, or committed other crimes against the Ukrainian people will ever feel safe.”
The assassination attempt came a day after Russian and Ukrainian delegations, including Alekseyev’s direct superior, Igor Kostyukov, met in Abu Dhabi, where both sides spoke of apparent progress in the peace talks.
Previous peace efforts have broken down over Russia’s maximalist territorial demands on Ukraine, with Moscow repeatedly rejecting Kyiv’s calls for an immediate ceasefire. The Trump administration has instructed both sides to end the war by June, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said.
Ukraine has targeted at least three Russian generals in the Moscow region over the past year, though such operations have typically involved explosives.
Alekseyev’s shooting was seen as the latest failure of Russia’s security services to protect senior military personnel within Russia. While details of who carried out the attack remain unclear, Russian military bloggers have criticised apparent security lapses and questioned how a gunman was able to enter the apartment building undetected.
