A senior Russian cruise missile engineer was shot dead near Moscow, with Ukrainian media reporting he was assassinated by Ukraine’s intelligence.
Mikhail Shatsky was found dead in the Kuzminki forest park in the suburb of Kotelniki southeast of Moscow this week.
Shatsky was deputy chief of design and head of software at the Moscow Experimental Design Bureau Mars, which develops automatic control and navigation systems for satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles. Mars is part of Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom.
Exiled opposition journalist Alexander Nevzorov, who first broke the news of the assassination, said Shatsky also oversaw upgrades of Kh-59 missiles into the low-flying subsonic Kh-69 versions.
The Russian military is known to use Kh-59, Kh-69 and Kh-101 missiles against Ukraine. The Ukrainian air force said Wednesday its systems intercepted two Kh-59/69 missiles over the Dnipropetrovsk region.
Several Ukrainian news outlets, including RBC and Ukrainska Pravda, reported citing anonymous sources that Shatsky was gunned down as part of a “special operation” by the Ukrainian military’s HUR defense intelligence agency.
“Anyone in any way involved in developing Russia’s military-industrial complex and thus supporting Russian aggression against Ukraine is a legitimate target for the [Ukrainian] defense forces,” Hromadske quoted an anonymous security service source as saying.
Russia’s investigative news website Important Stories said it was able to geolocate the site of Shatsky’s death as a 10-minute walk from his home in Kotelniki.
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