There was no immediate comment from Kyiv as Russian officials filed terrorism charges against the alleged Ukrainian agent.
Russia’s top security agency announced Saturday it had detained a suspect over the car bombing that killed a senior Russian general near Moscow, accusing Ukrainian special services of orchestrating the attack.
The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) said in an April 26
statement that it had arrested Ignat Kuzin, a 41-year-old man with a Ukrainian residence permit, for allegedly planting the explosive devices that killed Lt. Gen. Yaroslav Moskalik a day earlier.
Moskalik, 59, served as deputy head of the Main Operations Directorate of the Russian Armed Forces’ general staff. He was killed on April 25 when a Volkswagen Golf exploded in the city of Balashikha, east of Moscow.
Russian investigators
said Friday that the blast was triggered by a homemade explosive device packed with shrapnel, equivalent to over 300 grams of TNT.
According to a translation of the FSB’s Saturday statement, Kuzin was allegedly an “agent of the Ukrainian special services” who had been supplied with bomb-making components by Ukrainian intelligence operatives. The device was detonated remotely from the territory of Ukraine, the agency added.
Officials from the Investigative Committee of Russia said in a
separate statement on Saturday that Kuzin has confessed to carrying out the attack under orders from a Ukrainian handler who recruited him in 2023.
The investigative committee
said Friday it had opened a criminal case on charges of murder and illegal trafficking of explosives. On Saturday, officials said the case had been upgraded to include charges of terrorism.
There was no immediate official comment from Kyiv regarding the accusation.
Moskalik’s killing is the second assassination of a top Russian general in less than six months.
In December, Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, who headed Russia’s Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Defense Forces, was killed by a bomb hidden in a scooter near his Moscow apartment. His death came a day after a Ukrainian court sentenced him in absentia for Russia’s alleged use of banned chemical weapons.
The blast that killed Moskalik came just hours before President Donald Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff,
held talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow in an effort to advance negotiations to end the Russia–Ukraine war.
Trump, who has made brokering a peace agreement a major foreign policy goal, has been pressing Moscow and Kyiv to accept a U.S.-backed settlement proposal aimed at ending the conflict that began in February 2022.
Following a large-scale Russian missile and drone attack on Kyiv earlier in the week, Trump publicly urged Putin to halt strikes and refocus on diplomacy. “I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP! 5000 soldiers a week are dying. Let’s get the Peace Deal DONE!” he
posted on Truth Social on April 24.
The following day, Trump
said he had “a good day in talks and meetings” with both Ukrainian and Russian representatives, adding that the sides “are very close to a deal.“ He urged them to meet at high levels to ”finish it off,” saying most major points were already agreed to.
On April 26, Trump met face-to-face with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Rome—their first encounter since a tense Oval Office meeting in February that ended with Zelenskyy being asked to leave.
No details of the Rome meeting were immediately released. White House communications director Steven Cheung called it a “very productive” discussion. Zelenskyy also
described the meeting as “very symbolic” and said it had “the potential to become historic, if we achieve joint results.”
Meanwhile, the Kremlin has signaled cautious optimism about the state of negotiations, with Russian foreign policy aides suggesting that progress was made during Putin’s talks with Witkoff in Moscow.
