A senior Russian military commander was killed on Friday in a car explosion in a Moscow suburb, investigators said, the latest in a series of apparent assassinations targeting Ukraine’s opponents inside Russia that have come as cease-fire talks show few signs of progress.
The Investigative Committee of Russia, the country’s equivalent to the F.B.I., issued a statement identifying the officer as Lt. Gen. Yaroslav Moskalik, a senior figure in the Russian military. The investigators said that they had opened a criminal inquiry into the explosion, which took place in the town of Balashikha, east of Moscow.
The explosion came the same day that Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s special envoy, met with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia at the Kremlin for another round of high-profile negotiations over ending the war in Ukraine and re-establishing the bilateral relationship between Russia and the United States.
Mr. Putin has cast aside Mr. Trump’s calls for a quick peace in Ukraine, and Russia’s airstrikes on civilian targets appear to be increasing in ferocity. Hours after Russian strikes killed at least 12 people and injured 90 others in a huge attack on Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, on Thursday, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, called for more pressure to be brought on Moscow to get closer to a “complete, unconditional cease-fire.”
The Ukrainian authorities had no immediate comment on Friday about General Moskalik’s death.
General Moskalik served as deputy head of the main operational department of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, a division that conducts planning and execution of military operations. In 2015, he was part of the Russian delegation at talks in Minsk, Belarus, with Ukraine that failed to secure peace in eastern Ukraine, according to RBC, a Russian news outlet.
Video circulating on social media and verified by The New York Times showed a car exploding and catching fire outside an apartment block, sending a thick plume of smoke into the air. Other footage verified by The Times showed people rushing to the scene as secondary explosions echoed in the distance.
The Investigative Committee published a video from the scene showing what appeared to be a charred Volkswagen Golf parked just outside a residential building. In a separate statement, the investigators said that they were trying to assess who was behind the killing but did not name any suspects.
But General Moskalik’s killing follows a series of similar attacks against opponents of the Ukrainian government. In February, a prominent pro-Russia separatist figure from Ukraine, Armen Sarkisyan, was killed when a bomb exploded inside a gated residence in Moscow. Ukrainian officials did not comment on the blast at the time.
In December, a general in charge of the Russian military’s nuclear and chemical weapons protection forces, Igor Kirillov, was killed by a bomb near the entrance to a residential building in Moscow. An official with Ukraine’s security service, known as the S.B.U., said at the time that Ukraine was responsible for the killing.
In April 2023, Maksim Fomin, more popularly known as Vladlen Tatarsky, an influential Ukrainian-born pro-Russian military blogger and activist, was killed after a bomb exploded in a cafe in St. Petersburg. The bomb was planted inside a statuette of his likeness during a public talk that he was giving. More than 40 people were injured as a result of the explosion. Russian investigators later arrested a woman who brought the statuette and accused Ukraine of organizing the killing.
In August 2022, a car exploded outside a festival held near Moscow, killing Daria Dugina, a prominent conservative activist. American intelligence agencies said that they believed parts of the Ukrainian government authorized the attack.
Maria Varenikova and Sanjana Varghese contributed reporting.
