Killing the negotiators
Assassination attempt on Russian military intel general. Budanov vs Poklad. Back to the 2022 Kireev killing. MI6 vs CIA once again?
Yet another Russian general has been subjected to an assassination attempt. We’ll go through what exactly happened, then examine a number of possible explanations for the attack. This will lead us onto the deep conflicts in the Ukrainian intelligence apparatus — behind the CIA-trained, pro-ceasefire Kirillo Budanov, and the dark, MI6-linked figure of Oleksandr Poklad, also known as ‘the strangler’.
The shooting
According to Russian media, general Vladislav Alekseev survived the February 6 attempt on his life, despite having received three bullets.
Before, a quick irony. Alexeev, one of Russia’s most patriotic and beloved war heroes, was born in the central Ukrainian village Holodki, Vynnytsia oblast. Meanwhile, head of Ukraine’s army Oleksandr Syrsky was born in the Russian village Novinki, Vladimir oblast. Ukraine’s branch of radio free Europe found that Alexeev had even visited his home village in 2014, after the victory of the euromaidan. His relatives recall that he had told them there would never be war with Russia - ‘not in my darkest nightmares’.
Anyway, back to the attempt on Alexeev’s life. The prominent Russian publication Kommersant released some interesting details today about what exactly happened. At around 7am, Alexeev left his modest apartment in Moscow to go to work. As an aside, Ukrainian ex-intelligence officers told radio free Europe today they were surprised that Alexeev lived in such an unpretentious area, let alone that he lacked security.
Anyway, Alexeev didn’t make it to the driver waiting outside. The assassin, supposedly disguised as a food deliveryman, had already entered the building.
The shoot wounded Alexeev in the arm and leg, but the general fought back and tried to wrest the pistol away. In the process, he was shot again in the chest, but this active resistance seemed to have saved Alexeev from death. He is now comatose in intensive care, as one of the bullets hit a major organ. The shooter remains on the loose, though law enforcement has footage of his appearance. Some other reports claim that it was a female shooter.
One of many
Of course, Alexeev certainly isn’t the first high-level Russian general attacked recently. Ivan Stupak, a SBU (Security Services of Ukraine) officer interviewed today by Radio Svoboda (Ukraine’s branch of Radio Free Europe) said that no less than four Russian generals have been killed by Ukrainian intelligence agencies. Alexeev is relatively unique in having survived.
Ukrainian Militant, a telegram channel associated with Ukrainian military intelligence (GUR), gloated about the attack as yet another in a long string of successful operations. These killings were named:
Oleg Yuryevich Tsokov - Lieutenant General, Deputy Commander of the Southern Military District.
Killed in a July 2023 missile attack on a Russian Armed Forces position during combat operations in the Zaporizhia region.
Valery Trankovsky - Captain 1st Rank, Chief of Staff of the 41st Missile Brigade of the Black Sea Fleet.
Killed in a November 2024 car explosion in Sevastopol (Crimea).
Dmitry Vladimirovich Golenkov - Pilot, Chief of Staff of the Aviation Squadron of the 52nd Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment of the Russian Aerospace Forces (Tu-22M3).
Killed. Found in November 2024 with multiple head injuries (presumably inflicted with a hammer) in the Bryansk region.
Igor Kirillov - Lieutenant General, Head of the Radiological, Chemical, and Biological Defense (RCBD) Troops of the Russian Armed Forces.
Killed in a December 2024 explosion of a concealed explosive device on an electric scooter near his home in Moscow.
Yaroslav Yaroslavovich Moskalik - Lieutenant General, Deputy Chief of the Main Operational Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces.
Killed in an April 2025 car explosion in Balashikha (Moscow Region).
Mikhail Gudkov - Major General (Deputy Commander of the Navy/High-ranking Naval Officer).
Killed in a July 2025 attack on a position in the Kursk region.
Fanil Fanisovich Sarvarov - Lieutenant General, Head of Operational Preparation of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces.
Killed in a December 2025 car explosion in Moscow.
Vladimir Alekseev - Lieutenant General, Deputy Chief of the GRU of the Russian Armed Forces.
Shot in the entrance of his home. Status to be updated.
As Stupak, the former SBU officer told Ukrainian media, the SBU generally doesn’t actually take responsibility for these killings. Accordingly, both the SBU and the Ukrainian government have so remained silent on the matter.
A big fish in the aquarium
Alexeev was a very important figure in Russia’s Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, formerly known as the GRU. It is also colloquially called ‘the aquarium’, particularly by its denizens.
As you may recall from my articles on the Russian patriotic spook novelist Alexandr Prokhanov, the GRU has the reputation of being a stronghold of nationalist, anti-western, active operations, perhaps even at conflict with the KGB/FSB, an institution with more blurred loyalties.
Alexeev had the codename ‘Omega’, though he was often simply called ‘Stepanych’ by his adoring subordinates. He has been first deputy head of the GRU since 2011, living through three heads of the institution. As I wrote in a recent article, it is a long tradition in Soviet/post-soviet intelligence agencies for the deputy heads to play a more important role than the putative directors.
In other words, Alexeev is one of the most important individuals in the Russian intelligence community.
In particular, Alexeev was responsible for coordinating various paramilitaries and covert operations. Ukrainian military intelligence calls him a ‘war criminal’ and accuses him of responsibility for interference in the 2016 US elections, including cyber-attacks on the Democratic Party.
Since its 2014 creation, Alexeev was often named the main curator of the Wagner PMC. ‘Stepanych’ quite beloved by the Russian military patriotic community. Since 2022, he has been in charge of coordinating and creating various volunteer units in the Russian army, like PMC Redan and the right-wing hooligan unit Espanyola.
Alexeev’s status as the country’s chief specialist in so-called ‘hybrid warfare’, naturally, makes him a major target for Russia’s enemies.
The internal angle
Alexeev was also in charge of conducting negotiations with Evgeny Prigozhin in Rostov during his 2023 mutiny.
Alexeev was sent because of his closeness to the structure he himself had partly created. In fact, if anyone in the Russian elite were to have supported the uprising, it would have been Alexeev. Once Alexeev publicly went again the uprising, it was clear that Prigozhin was doomed. Nevertheless, there were ambiguities. Alexeev called for Prigozhin to cease his mutiny in order to ‘prevent civil war’, but this was hardly the harsh condemnation of Prigozhin as a traitor that Putin, for instance, made.
And when he was sent to negotiate with Prigozhin in Rostov, Alexeev was filmed joking that if he wanted, Prigozhin could ‘take’ the minister of defense Shoigu and head of the general Staff Gerasimov.
Following the end of the mutiny, western media claimed that Alexeev was detained, suspended from his position, and placed under observation due to his closeness to the traitor Prigozhin. Since then, however, Alexeev has clearly returned to his usual activities.
Consequently, the Washington Post has posited that ‘internal conflicts’ in Russia’s security apparatus were behind Alexeev’s death:
Targeting him at a time when his superior, Kostyukov, was taking part in U.S.-led negotiations to end the war could risk derailing those talks and angering the Trump administration, officials said.
Ukraine’s security services “have done these hits in the past but it would be pretty crazy of them to do it now,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official.
The former official also noted the involvement in those negotiations of Kyrylo Budanov — the former head of Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate and now Zelensky’s chief of staff — raising the stakes for Kyiv if Budanov’s former agency was shown to be linked to the attempted assassination.
“We are not stupid, believe me,” said a former senior Ukraine security official who worked closely with Budanov.
The former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information, said it was “much more likely” that the attempt on Alekseyev was related to a “domestic issue” including the general’s role in quelling a 2023 uprising of the Wagner Group, the powerful Russian paramilitary force.<
Some of Ukraine’s more unscrupulous political commentators have also been pushing this line. An entertaining idea, though waiting two and a half years to launch a failed assassination seems rather odd.
To be fair, there were also some in Russia who put forth this narrative. One of them was Maksim Shevchenko, an intellectual and politician who can be identified as a more leftwing and anti-western representative of the Dugin network. He hypothesizes that ‘the closer we get to the end of the war, the tougher the purges of those who have willpower, patriotic views, respect for the people, and military experience’.
More objective Ukrainian analysts, like the former SBU officer interviewed by Radio Svoboda, also rejected this hypothesis. As this SBU officer pointed out, if the Russian government was really displeased with Alexeev, then the Russian FSB would have simply arrested him. They probably did so in 2023, and there is nothing stopping them from doing it again now. Why on earth would they try to assassinate him, failing in the process?
The negotiations angle
Said SBU officer was more confident that the killing had something to do with negotiations, though he didn’t say how exactly. Igor Kostyukov, head of the GRU and Alexeev’s boss, is currently involved in the Abu Dhabi negotiations with representatives of Ukraine’s military, military intelligence (GUR), and security services (SBU).
And Alexeev himself has long been responsible for coordinating POW exchanges with the Ukrainian side. In this capacity, Alexeev was one of, if not the only Russian official to repeatedly meet with the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov.
As a result, Russian foreign minister Lavrov has already called the attack an attempt by Ukraine to sabotage negotiations:
The terrorist attack against Lieutenant General Alekseev confirmed the Zelensky regime’s intention to disrupt the negotiations… [this is an attempt to] derail the US from its course towards achieving a fair settlement.
Ukrainian political analyst Konstantin Bondarenko also admits of the possibility that this shooting was organized by a relatively independent ‘third force’ interested in sabotaging negotiations. He names the British, naturally. He also has this to claim about ongoing peace talks:
It’s worth noting that Bondarenko’s claims about progress at negotiations aren’t particularly believable. At any rate, the Ukrainian publication strana notes that there has been no public information justifying such a conclusion.
In particular when it comes to the only important question — whether Ukraine will abandon the Donbass. Yesterday, Zelensky made yet another statement that his army will never agree to such a withdrawal. Both Russia and Ukraine are confident that they need not make significant compromises, and are only engaging in the talks out of the fear that refusing to participate would anger Washington.
Other explanations
There are many on the Russian side who are also unconvinced that Alexeev was attacked due to his role in negotiations. Daniel Bezsonov, ex-speaker of the army of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), angrily denied any connection between the attack and negotiations, writing that Alexeev’s justified reputation as a powerful foe of Ukraine was behind the attempted assassination.
Even if it wasn’t due to negotiations, the blame will fall on the Ukrainians, naturally. And plenty of figures in the country have already quite strongly hinted that they were behind the attack.
Head of Azov’s 1st National Guard Corps, Denis Prokopenko, wrote that the assassination attempt was an act of revenge, promising that if Alexeev survived, he would still never be able to rest peacefully. Keep in mind that Prokopenko, being the commander of the Azov unit that surrendered in Mariupol in early 2022, himself spent time in Russian captivity and is intimately involved with the POW exchange process:
Poklad vs Budanov
I said that there has been no information justifying the conclusion that negotiations are going particularly well. However, there is one person who keeps on claiming that there is — head of Ukraine’s presidential administration Kyryllo Budanov. Just yesterday, he stated once more that negotiations are going swimmingly. Then Alexeev was shot.
So, what do we have so far? Alexeev was the Russian spook closest to his Ukrainian counterparts. The only real contacts since 2022 between the Russian and Ukrainian governments are those between Alexeev of the GRU and Budanov of the GUR.
And both Alexeev’s boss and Budanov himself have been involved in their respective negotiation teams in the middle east since mid-2025. In the aforementioned Washington Post article, a source from Budanov’s GUR denies any responsibility for the attack on Alexeev, since it would sabotage the negotiations that Budanov is personally involved in now.
But the GUR, headed by Budanov from 2020 to early 2026, isn’t the only Ukrainian intelligence service. In fact, most of the killings of high-ranking Russian officials have been linked with another agency - the Security Services of Ukraine (SBU).
And even more importantly — the GUR has long been at odds with the SBU. Just a few weeks ago, they engaged in a firefight on the outskirts of Kiev over control of a lucrative asset. Where Budanov and his GUR have been more closely linked with Trump and the CIA, the SBU is closer to London and MI6. Budanov has long been quite supportive of a ceasefire with Russia in order to preserve Ukraine’s statehood. The SBU, in contrast, has never made such statements. And as we will soon see, there are many signs that the SBU is quite interested in prolonging the war as long as possible.
And most importantly of all: in early 2022, the SBU assassinated Denys Kireev, a GUR agent involved in negotiations with Russia.
Budanov later publicly accused of the SBU of wrongdoing in this case. And the US press named the high-ranking SBU officer responsible. He is none other than Oleksandr Poklad — ‘the strangler’. A figure I have been covering at length recently, the man long since in charge of the SBU’s countless assassinations, and as of 2026, the most powerful individual in said institution.
It is to the 2022 Kireev affair and Poklad’s role in the 2026 Alexeev killing that we will now turn. This will take us to our beloved topics of the shadow war between London and Washington.
