Someone Is Killing the People Around Putin’s War — And Moscow Cannot Pretend It Is Coincidence
The phrase “Putin’s inner circle” is doing a lot of work. It suggests the same handful of siloviki who have sat beside him for two decades are being picked off one by one. That is not quite what is happening. What is happening is uglier in a different way. The people who keep the war running — generals, ammunition officers, helicopter commanders, mid-level officials, and the occasional fallen minister — are dying in parking lots, restaurants, and suburban streets that were supposed to be safe. On 1 September 2026, as another week of those killings was digested in Moscow, reports circulated that Vladimir Putin had expanded the central staff of the Federal Protective Service from 785 to 812 people. It is the fourth such increase since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Before the war, that office had gone almost 13 years without growing.879f2a
Thedailybeast
The Kremlin can call every blast a “terrorist act” and every gunshot a suicide. The pattern still stands: Russia’s home front is no longer a sanctuary for the men who planned, supplied, and justified the war.
A campaign, not a coincidence
Ukraine has not claimed every attack. Russian investigators often refuse to name the dead for days. Independent Russian and Western outlets have still assembled a sequence that looks less like random crime and more like a list.
In December 2024, Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, head of Russia’s nuclear, biological and chemical protection troops, was killed by a bomb hidden on an electric scooter outside his Moscow building. Ukraine’s security service later acknowledged that operation. In April 2025, Lt. Gen. Yaroslav Moskalik, a deputy head of the General Staff’s main operations directorate, died in a car bomb in Balashikha, a Moscow suburb built in part to house officers. On 22 December 2025, Lt. Gen. Fanil Sarvarov, who ran the General Staff’s operational training directorate, was killed when an explosive device detonated under his Kia in southern Moscow. Ukraine claimed that hit as well.344d33
NYTimes
The geography then repeated itself. On 9–10 June 2026, another car exploded in the same Balashikha neighbourhood. Russian and Ukrainian media, and a senior Ukrainian official speaking on condition of anonymity, identified the victim as Damir Davydov, a senior officer in the Defence Ministry’s Main Missile and Artillery Directorate — the bureaucracy that feeds the guns. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin had been briefed and that details were “not subject to public disclosure.” The location was the insult. Officers were dying a few hundred metres from the last assassination, in housing the state had designed for them.ed1883
NYTimes
August made the point again. An explosion at an Italian restaurant in central Moscow on 2 August, reportedly tied to a gathering around Aerospace Forces commander Alexander Chaiko, killed several people, including Maj. Gen. Valery Plokhotnyuk. On 27 August, a bomb in a car in St. Petersburg’s Shushary district killed Lt. Col. Sergei Sechkov of the 332nd Helicopter Regiment; his wife was badly wounded. Independent outlet Agentstvo and Ukrainian intelligence have accused that unit of strikes on civilians. Earlier in the same stretch, Robert Shagaev, a former Ukrainian naval officer who defected to Russia, was killed in occupied Crimea by a device in a rubbish bin. Ukrainian services have also been linked to attempts on drone-plant managers and other rear-area figures.e9801b
Thedailybeast
Independent outlet Mediazona, working with BBC Russian, has confirmed at least 15 Russian general-level deaths since February 2022 — some at the front, some in crashes, some in Moscow. The political meaning of the last group is larger than the raw number. A general killed near Kharkiv is a battlefield loss. A general killed outside his apartment is a statement that the FSB cannot lock the capital.c6f705
Zona
The other body count
A second, older pattern runs alongside the car bombs. Businessmen fall from windows. Officials are found with a rifle and a note. In July 2025, transport minister Roman Starovoyt was dismissed by Putin in the morning and found dead of a gunshot wound hours later in Odintsovo, an affluent district west of Moscow. Investigators called suicide the working theory. He had governed Kursk before the Ukrainian incursion there; Russian media immediately filled the vacuum with talk of coming corruption charges. An associate, Andrei Korneichuk, died the same day, officially of heart failure. Pipeline executives, local deputies, and energy managers have joined a list that Western tabloids now treat as a club. Some of those deaths may be genuine despair. Some may be criminal. Some may be the quiet settling of accounts in an economy where Western capital left and assets became prizes. They are not the same as a Ukrainian IED under a general’s car. Lumping them together is how conspiracy travels. Separating them is how the story stays honest.72792f
NYTimes
There is a third track still: critics killed abroad. In June 2026, artist Robert Kuzovkov, who worked under the name Semyon Skrepetsky and drew savage caricatures of Putin, was shot in a car park in Biała Podlaska, Poland, days after a one-man protest in Berlin. That looks like the old exile playbook, not like the campaign against the war staff.ff0ff7
BBC
Yevgeny Prigozhin’s 2023 plane crash sits in a category of its own. He had led a mutiny. He was not a staff officer. Western reporting later pointed at Nikolai Patrushev and the security state. That killing, if it was one, was about loyalty. The 2025–2026 bombs are about logistics.
Who is actually in danger
Putin’s real political inner circle — the security-council hardliners, the men who have known him since Leningrad — has not been erased. What has been punctured is the assumption that rank and a Moscow address are armour. The targets that keep appearing are the people who train formations, move shells, fly helicopters, and sit close enough to the war to have names on Ukrainian lists. Former Putin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov has argued that Kyiv’s programme is broader than generals: public accusations of war crimes become targeting folders. European reporting has described a shadow war in which Ukrainian services hit inside Russia more often than in the first years of the invasion, while Russian attempts abroad have often looked sloppy.60f16e
Sofrep
That mismatch matters inside the Kremlin. Fox News and European sources have described friction between the FSB and the army over who is supposed to protect senior officers. After Sarvarov’s death, accounts of a tense meeting had Valery Gerasimov blaming the special services for lack of foresight. When security agencies start treating the military as a rival rather than a client, officers drive to work without a real shield.984545
Fox News
The bunker and the extra 27 people
The FSO expansion is small in raw numbers and large as a signal. The service guards the president, the prime minister, parliamentary speakers, top judges and the prosecutor general. It also handles secure communications. Adding 27 posts at headquarters does not stop a bomb under a colonel’s BMW in Shushary. It tells you where Putin’s fear is pointed: at himself, his residences, and the people who stand next to him. Financial Times reporting earlier in 2026 described long stretches in underground bunkers and fewer public appearances. Leaked European intelligence assessments, reported by iStories, CNN and others, said he feared leaks, a coup, and even a drone strike from inside the elite. Staff near him have been barred from public transport and phones. Some accounts say officials must surrender watches and pass extra screening before they enter the room. Isolation is not the same as safety. It is what a leader does when he no longer trusts the ordinary city.4ecc2a
Meduza
What remains unproven
Attribution is incomplete by design. Ukraine claims the operations that serve its narrative and stays silent on others. Russia blames Kyiv for almost everything and almost never publishes a forensic case the public can test. Some “suicides” will be suicides. Some explosions may involve criminals, jealous partners, or local scores that have nothing to do with the SBU. The gap is where speculation lives, and the Kremlin prefers that gap. A closed investigation is a political tool.
What no longer requires speculation is the effect. Four and a half years into the war, senior Russians tied to the fight are being hunted in their own cities. Neighbourhoods built for officers have become crime scenes. A minister can be fired at dawn and dead by afternoon. The president answers by hiring more palace guards. The people who launched the invasion assumed the home front would stay quiet, disciplined, and invisible. It is none of those things. Someone — more than one someone, almost certainly — has decided that the war’s managers should feel it where they live. Moscow has not found a way to make that stop.
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