Mikhail Shatsky believed to have been assassinated by Ukraine intelligence operatives
A Russian scientist known for developing cruise missiles has been found shot dead in a snowy wooded area near Moscow.
Kyiv’s intelligence service claimed it had assassinated Mikhail Shatsky, a deputy director of a Moscow-based ballistics engineering unit.
“Anyone who is involved in the development of the Russian military-industrial complex and support of Russian aggression in Ukraine one way or another is a legitimate target,” a Ukrainian defence source told the Kyiv Independent.
The Russian authorities, propagandists and mainstream news channels have not commented.
Photographs published by pro-Ukraine channels on the Telegram social messaging system showed a man wearing jeans and a black coat lying in blood-drenched snow.
It was not possible to identify the body as Shatsky, although a close-up of the face showed the dead man wore his trademark dark moustache.
A second Ukrainian intelligence source confirmed to Ukrainskaya Pravda that Ukrainian intelligence agents had plotted and carried out the killing.
“Mikhail Shatsky was shot dead by an assassin in the Kuzminki Forest Park near Kotelniki, Moscow Oblast,” the source said.
Important Stories, a Russian anti-war exiled Telegram channel, said that it had geolocated the spot where Shatsky’s body was found to a remote section of wood to the south east of Moscow, roughly a 10-minute walk from the scientist’s house.
Mr Shatsky was a lead scientist at the Kremlin’s Mars Design Bureau, which specialises in developing on-board automatic control and navigation systems for aircraft, spacecraft and missiles, according to local media.
He had been credited with working on secret Kremlin plans to incorporate AI technology into Russian drones, aircraft and spacecraft. He also oversaw the modernisation of the Kh-59 and Kh-69 cruise missiles, which the Kremlin has fired at Ukrainian cities.
Russian missile tests
Since 2017, Mars has been under the control of Rosatom, the Kremlin’s prestige nuclear agency.
The killing of Mr Shatsky was initially revealed by Alexander Nevzorov, an anti-Kremlin journalist with more than one million subscribers on Telegram. He accused the scientist of killing “thousands of innocent Ukrainians”.
“It seems that none of those guilty of the genocide of Ukrainians will die a natural death,” he said.
Ukraine’s intelligence services have been linked to several assassinations inside Russia since the Kremlin’s invasion in February 2022.
These have included a car bomb that killed the daughter of one of Vladimir Putin’s hard-Right philosopher-advisers, a booby-trapped bust that killed a pro-war propagandist and a handful of shootings of army, navy and air force officers.
The former head of a notorious prison in Russian-occupied Donetsk was killed by a car bomb in Donetsk city this week.
Sergei Yevsyukov commanded the Olenivka prison in 2022 when at least 50 Ukrainian prisoners were killed in a missile strike, believed to have been fired by Russian forces and framed as a Ukrainian attack. The prison was also notorious for torture.
Vladimir Putin even denied using a body double after accusations he was fearful of being assassinated by a Ukrainian agent.
