FSB Detains Moldovan in Russian Officer Shooting — SkimNews
Get the Geopolitics newsletter
Daily geopolitics — wars, elections, sanctions, the diplomatic moves that move markets. Free.
- Russia's Federal Security Service detained the Moldovan national on charges of attempted murder and illegal arms trafficking, alleging he was recruited by Ukrainian intelligence in 2025, arrived in Russia in June, and was caught in the Astrakhan region while attempting to return to Moldova.
- The senior Defense Ministry officer was shot at least six times on Sept. 3 in the Probuzhdenie settlement on the outskirts of Engels — home to an air force base that hosts Russia's strategic bombers used in strikes on Ukraine — and survived, remaining hospitalized.
- The suspect was allegedly offered $70,000 for the attack, according to Investigative Committee spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko.
- President Volodymyr Zelenskyy alluded to the attack on the day it occurred, declaring: "Wherever Russian criminals hide, they will be found, and today there is further confirmation of this fact – confirmation in the Saratov region."
- The Saratov shooting is the latest in a string of bombings targeting figures linked to Russia's 2022 invasion — a car bomb near St. Petersburg killed a serviceman and injured his wife in late August, and a drone-factory director was badly injured with his driver killed outside Yekaterinburg roughly three weeks earlier.
- Ukraine's SBU publicly claimed responsibility for killing Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, head of Russia's nuclear, biological and chemical protection forces, in a scooter-borne bomb outside his Moscow apartment in 2024.
- President Vladimir Putin earlier this year directed the FSB and other agencies to tighten security around military and government officials following the wave of attacks.
Why it matters: The arrest gives Russia a propaganda victory it can directly attribute to Kyiv — a confessed Ukrainian intelligence operation targeting a strategic-bomber base region — while underscoring that Kyiv's covert campaign inside Russia is now frequent enough to have prompted Putin to order tightened security for military and government personnel.
Ask SkimNews
