An east Ukrainian crime boss and separatist wanted by Kyiv was killed with one other person in a blast at a luxury residential complex in Moscow on Monday, Russian media reported.
Armen Sarkisian, a known mafia boss from east Ukraine who had formed a battalion to fight against Kyiv, is the latest target in a string of explosions on Russian soil.
Russia has been hit by a series of killings and mysterious blasts since launching its offensive in Ukraine in 2022.
Sarkisian has been wanted by Kyiv since 2014 and Ukraine’s SBU security service had in December declared him a suspect in “recruiting prisoners to fight in Ukraine.”
“Sarkisian died in hospital after an assassination in Moscow,” the TASS news agency reported, after Russian media initially said he was seriously wounded in the blast.
Russian police earlier said one other person was killed in the “incident” at the complex in northwest Moscow.
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The Kremlin said special services were working at the scene and declined to comment while “information was being clarified.”
Kyiv had not yet commented.
In December, it said it was behind the killing of Russian army general Igor Kirillov in Moscow, its most audacious attack to date. Last May, the U.S. State Department announced sanctions against Kirillov’s unit, saying the U.S. had recorded the use of chloropicrin, a poison gas first deployed in World War I, against Ukrainian troops.
“I am very scared”
Russia’s Kommersant newspaper reported that an “explosive device went off when he (Sarkisian) entered the building with security guards,” adding that one of the guards had died.
Footage released by Russia’s main investigative agency, the Investigative Committee, showed a building hall with glass doors shattered and suspended ceilings torn up.
The Committee said it opened a criminal probe into the explosion on the charges of murder by means injurious to the public and attempted murder of two or more people.
The red-brick high-rise building was closed off by police and a helicopter was seen arriving at the scene.
Andrei, a 37-year-old manager who was nearby at the time, said his colleagues had “jumped from their seats” at the sound of the blast, before going outside and seeing smoke.
The explosion was the second killing on the streets of Moscow in less than two months, with Kirillov dying after an explosive device attached to a scooter went off outside a residential building.
Olga Voronova, a 36-year-old mother of three who lived in the building next door to the explosion, was worried.
“I am very scared,” she told AFP.
“I don’t understand how this happened, we have quite serious security guards, they ask every car at the checkpoints, we order passes for guests, even for family members,” the shaken woman said. “So I don’t understand all this, it’s very scary.”
Russian media said Sarkisian had in 2022 formed a unit named “ArBAT” to fight against Ukraine.
According to the SBU, Sarkisian was “close” to Ukraine’s ousted ex-leader Viktor Yanukovych and has been on a wanted list since 2014, accused of “organizing murders” during Kyiv’s pro-EU revolution.
The SBU said Sarkisian oversaw prisons in the occupied Donetsk region, from which he recruited convicts.
“Efforts are underway to bring the offender to justice for his crimes against Ukraine,” it said in December.
Kommersant reported that the unit Sarkisian had formed was made up of “around 500 people”, most of whom are ethnic Armenians.
According to Russian media, Sarkisian was born in Armenia but moved to east Ukraine’s city of Gorlivka at a young age and also used the pseudonym of Armen Gorlovsky, a reference to the industrial city.
Gorlivka has been under pro-Russian separatist control since 2014.
Other targeted attacks
Since Russia invaded, several prominent figures have been killed in targeted attacks believed to have been carried out by Ukraine.
In December, a bomb planted under a car in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Donetsk killed Sergei Yevsyukov, the former head of the Olenivka Prison where dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war died in a missile strike in July 2022. One other person was injured in the blast. Russian authorities said they detained a suspect in the attack.
Darya Dugina, a commentator on Russian TV channels and the daughter of Kremlin-linked nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin, died in a 2022 car bombing that investigators suspected was aimed at her father.
Vladlen Tatarsky, a popular military blogger, died in April 2023, when a statuette given to him at a party in St. Petersburg exploded. A Russian woman, who said she presented the figurine on orders of a contact in Ukraine, was convicted and sentenced to 27 years in prison.
In December 2023, Illia Kiva, a former pro-Moscow Ukrainian lawmaker who fled to Russia, was shot and killed near Moscow. The Ukrainian military intelligence lauded the killing, warning that other “traitors of Ukraine” would share the same fate.