A car bomb has killed a senior Russian general in southern Moscow, Russian investigators said in a statement on their Telegram channel on Monday.
Lieutenant General Fanil Sarvarov, head of the General Staff’s Operational Training Directorate, died after an explosive device detonated beneath his vehicle early in the morning, according to Russia’s Investigative Committee.
The blast occurred at about 7am local time in a residential car park on Yasenevaya Street.
Sarvarov was inside the car at the time. He later died in hospital from his injuries, investigators said.
Investigators said the device had been planted under the vehicle and triggered shortly after the car began moving. Russian media Fontanka reported that fragments from the explosion damaged at least seven nearby cars.
Svetlana Petrenko, spokesperson for the Investigative Committee, said a criminal case had been opened under articles covering murder committed in a socially dangerous manner and the illegal trafficking of explosives.
“Investigators are pursuing several lines of inquiry,” Petrenko said, according to state news agency TASS. “One of them concerns the possible involvement of Ukrainian intelligence services.”
Ukraine has not commented on the killing.
Images released by the Investigative Committee showed a white car with its doors torn off and extensive damage to the interior. Forensic teams and investigators were deployed to the scene throughout the morning.
The Kremlin said President Vladimir Putin was informed of Sarvarov’s death shortly after the explosion. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not provide further comment.
Sarvarov, 56, was born in 1969 in the Perm region. According to TASS, he held a number of senior command roles during his military career. He took part in combat operations during the Ossetian-Ingush conflict and the Chechen wars in the 1990s.
Between 2015 and 2016, Sarvarov was involved in planning and conducting Russian military operations in Syria. He was appointed head of the General Staff’s Operational Training Directorate in 2016.
The killing adds to a growing list of targeted attacks on senior Russian military figures since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
In April this year, General Yaroslav Moskalik was killed in a car bomb attack near Moscow, according to Russian authorities. In December 2024, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, head of Russia’s nuclear, biological and chemical protection forces, died after a bomb hidden in an electric scooter exploded outside his apartment building.
Other high-profile killings include the shooting of naval officer Stanislav Rzhitsky in Krasnodar in July 2023 and the death of military blogger Maxim Fomin, known as Vladlen Tatarsky, who was killed by an explosive device in a café in Saint Petersburg in April 2023.
In August 2022, Daria Dugina, the daughter of nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin, was killed in a car bomb attack outside Moscow.
Russian authorities have repeatedly accused Ukraine of orchestrating assassinations on Russian soil and in Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine. Kyiv has denied involvement in some cases and declined to comment in others.
HT
