A senior Russian military officer was killed when a car exploded on Friday in the town of Balashikha just east of Moscow, Russia’s Investigative Committee said.
It named the officer as Yaroslav Moskalik, deputy head of the Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, and said it had opened a criminal case into the incident.
“According to available data, the explosion occurred as a result of the detonation of a homemade explosive device filled with destructive elements,” the Investigative Committee said in a statement.
The statement did not say who might be behind the incident. Several high-ranking Russian military figures have been assassinated since the 2022 start of the war in Ukraine.
The bombing came amid a push to wind down the war, now into its fourth year, with the Trump administration’s U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff in Moscow, where it was expected he’d meet Friday …