American businessman turned diplomatic envoy for President Donald Trump, Steve Witkoff, arrived in Moscow for further rapprochement talks wit the Russian Federation.
The Russian government confirmed the arrival of Donald Trump’s Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff at Vnukovo International Airport on Friday where he is to have more meetings with Russian leaders, including President Vladimir Putin, as part of the ongoing rapprochement process.
Just hours before Witkoff landed, however, a Moscow suburb was rocked by an explosion which killed a Kremlin General. While no responsibility for the blast has been claimed, some Western outlets have stated the apparent attack has the hallmarks of a Kyiv-led assassination operation, several of which have been seen against Russian and pro-Kremlin Ukrainian citizens recent years.
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Russian state media said before his planned meeting with President Putin, America’s Witkoff met with Kirill Dmitriev, and the two “took a short walk around the center of the Russian capital”. Harvard-educated Dmitriev is the leader of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and has had a prominent role in re-establishing links between the two nations, and despite having war-related sanctions against him recently visited Washington D.C. for talks.
Personal spokesman for the Russian President Dmitry Peskov said of Witkoff’s Putin meeting: “Russian President Vladimir Putin is receiving President Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff in the Kremlin. This is their fourth personal meeting since February of this year”.
On Friday morning, an explosion took place in the Moscow region of Balashikha. The Kremlin said the blast, a car bomb, killed deputy chief of the Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces Major General Yaroslav Moskalik. Britain’s BBC notes that General Moskalik had been highly regarded within the Russian Ministry of Defence as an analytical thinker and that he had previously represented as a negotiator in the Russia at the 2014 Minsk agreements.
That those 2014 negotiations had been a sham and a deliberate ploy by Russia to buy time for its own rearmament to launch a later, larger invasion is a key claim of Ukraine when arguing that Russia cannot be trusted and any new negotiations now are simply a feint. The killed man’s link hence could be seen as lending credence, as expressed by the Guardian newspaper, that this was a Ukraine-directed assassination.
Ukraine has not claimed responsibility for the blast at the time of publication, but it certainly has taken on the political assassination as one of the weapons in its armoury over the course of this war, with car bombs particularly favoured. As previously reported in December 2024 when Ukraine said it had “liquidated” a number of pro-Russian figures, a missile scientist and a Ukrainian prison governor who had supported Moscow:
These assassinations are just the latest in a line of such “liquidations” by the Ukrainian state taking out what it calls traitors and collaborators. Last month, a senior naval officer accused of war crimes was assassinated in Sevastopol, Crimea, also taken out with a car bomb. Russia confirmed the killing, calling it a terrorist attack. As noted at the time: “Russian media reported that the explosion tore off Trankovsky’s legs and he died from blood loss”.
In October, a high-ranking Russian officer involved in the special operations forces was assassinated just days after returning to Moscow from the Ukraine front lines. Nikita Klenkov was shot through his car window by a lurking gunman who was able to escape.
Just days before that, the head of security at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant was another victim to a Ukrainian car bomb. Kyiv claimed the assassination, calling Andriy Korotkyy a war criminal who had been “involved in the organization and execution of war crimes and repression of Ukrainians under occupation”, making the slaying justified “retribution”.
In April, a Moscow-loyal Ukrainian official “collaborator” in occupied Luhansk who ran the state education agency was killed by a car bomb. He was accused of allowing Russian propaganda into children’s classrooms.
Formerly reasonably mainstream pre-war Ukrainian politicians have been the subject of liquidations too. In December 2023, Ilya Kiva — who had been a member of Parliament in the Ukrainian Rada until the wartime purge of dissenting lawmakers under martial law — was shot in the head. The Ukrainian intelligence services called him a “top traitor, collaborator and propagandist… criminal” and claimed the assassination.
The month before in November 2023 Ukraine also claimed the killing of Mikhail Filiponenko of occupied Luhansk, also a pro-Russian Ukrainian lawmaker. Ukrainian intelligence said: “He was involved in the organization of torture camps in the occupied territories of the Luhansk region, where prisoners of war and civilian hostages were subjected to inhumane torture. Filiponenko himself personally brutally tortured people” and said he was blown up in a car bomb by partisans.
In some cases, the means of collecting intelligence on assassination targets by Ukrainian spies is very characteristically modern. When Russian submarine commander Stanislav Rzhitsky was shot dead while jogging in Krasnodar it is stated he may have been tracked by GPS fitness app Strava.
