Putin Loses Control as Surprise Attack WIPES OUT Putin’s Merciless Butchers in Russia
ENGELS, Russia — A gunman on a motorcycle, his face hidden behind a helmet, pulled up outside a private home in the village of Probuzhdeniye just after 7 a.m. on September 3. He fired two shots — one to the face, one to the torso — then sped away. Within hours, Russian state media confirmed only the barest outline: a serviceman had been attacked near the city of Engels, and a criminal investigation into attempted murder had been opened.
What Russian officials would not confirm, but what pro-war Telegram channels and independent outlets quickly reported, was the identity of the victim: Major General Nikolai Varpakhovich, commander of the 22nd Heavy Bomber Aviation Division of Russia’s Aerospace Forces — the unit that flies the Tu-95 and Tu-160 bombers responsible for launching many of Russia’s long-range cruise missile strikes on Ukraine.
The shooting has become the latest, and in some ways the most symbolically loaded, entry in a string of attacks on senior Russian military and security figures that stretches back nearly two years — a pattern that is forcing open a conversation Moscow would rather avoid: how secure is the Russian state, really, inside its own borders?
A General With a Marked Name
Varpakhovich’s division operates out of Engels-2, the air base at the heart of Russia’s nuclear-capable bomber fleet. That alone would make him a person of interest to Ukrainian intelligence. But he carries a heavier reputation in Kyiv. Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, filed charges against him in absentia just days before the shooting, tying him to the July 2024 missile strike that tore through Kyiv’s Okhmatdyt children’s hospital — an attack that killed several people, including a child, and devastated the facility’s oncology, toxicology and intensive-care wings.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did not confirm any Ukrainian role in the September 3 shooting. But in remarks that day, he came close to acknowledging it obliquely, saying Kyiv would continue “asymmetric operations” and that “wherever Russian war criminals would try to hide, they will be found” — adding pointedly that there was “confirmation of that… on the territory of Saratov Oblast.” It was the kind of statement designed to be read two ways at once: firm enough to send a message, vague enough to preserve deniability.
As of this week, Varpakhovich was reported to be in serious condition, having been flown to Moscow for treatment. His driver was also wounded but survived.
Not an Isolated Incident
If the identification holds, Varpakhovich becomes at least the sixth or seventh senior Russian military official to be shot, bombed or otherwise targeted since 2022, according to a tally compiled by the independent outlet Meduza. Three of those attacks were fatal. Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, who oversaw Russia’s nuclear, biological and chemical protection forces, was killed in December 2024 by a bomb hidden on a scooter outside his Moscow apartment. Lieutenant General Yaroslav Moskalik, a senior officer in the general staff’s operations directorate, was killed by a car bomb the following year.
The through-line connecting these cases is not the method — bombs, bullets and booby-trapped vehicles have all been used — but the target profile: officers whose names are, in Kyiv’s telling, tied to specific attacks on Ukrainian civilians, and who apparently believed themselves safe deep inside Russian territory.
Moscow has generally pointed the finger at Ukraine after these episodes. Kyiv, for its part, has never formally claimed responsibility for any single one of them, preferring the kind of ambiguous signaling Zelensky offered this week. That ambiguity is doing real work: it lets Ukraine claim moral credit for pursuing accountability while denying Russia a clean narrative — and clean evidence — with which to retaliate or rally domestic anger.
A Security Apparatus Under Strain
Independent Russian and Western reporting suggests the attacks are unsettling the officer corps well beyond the individual victims. Analysts who track Russian military morale say a pattern of quiet transfer requests, early retirements and reluctance to serve in exposed postings has become more visible as the assassination attempts have piled up. For officers who spent much of the war assuming that distance from the front line meant safety, the string of attacks inside Russia’s own cities has undercut that assumption.
There is also a broader political backdrop against which this attack lands. Russia’s economy has absorbed years of Western sanctions, and reporting from outlets including the Financial Times has described growing unease inside elite circles about the war’s duration and cost. Earlier this summer, Andrei Klepach, chief economist at Russia’s state development bank VEB.RF, was removed from his post after telling a closed-door forum that Russia was “losing this war of attrition” — remarks that reportedly invoked historical comparisons to the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917 and the Soviet Union in 1991. His dismissal, following swiftly after the remarks leaked to independent media, was widely read as a sign of how sensitive the Kremlin has become to any public acknowledgment of strain.
Separately, a leaked European intelligence assessment reported by CNN and the Financial Times over the summer identified former Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, now secretary of Russia’s Security Council, as a potential “coup risk” in Kremlin threat assessments — an indication, if accurate, of just how far distrust has spread within Vladimir Putin’s own inner circle.
What We Don’t Know
It’s worth being precise about where verified fact ends and speculation begins in this story. Russian authorities have not officially named Varpakhovich as the victim; that identification rests on Telegram channels and Russian tabloid outlets like Mash and Shot, not on any statement from the Investigative Committee or the Defense Ministry. Ukraine has not claimed the attack. The link between the SBU’s charges against Varpakhovich, filed just days earlier, and the shooting itself is an inference built on timing, not direct evidence.
Broader claims that have circulated alongside this story — elaborate accounts of identical decoy offices built for Putin in multiple cities, the use of body doubles, or precise real-time descriptions of panic inside the Kremlin — originate largely from investigative outlets like Systema and secondhand sourcing, and should be treated as reported allegations rather than confirmed fact. Some of it may well be true; some of it is the natural byproduct of a closed, opaque system where information is scarce and rumor fills the vacuum. Readers should weigh such claims accordingly.
The Bigger Picture
What is not in dispute is the cumulative effect of two years of attacks reaching further into Russian territory and higher up the chain of command. A war that Russian officials have worked hard to keep visually and emotionally distant from major cities has, in a series of isolated but connected incidents, become impossible to fully contain. Whether the September 3 shooting in Engels was the work of Ukrainian intelligence, a settling of internal scores, or something else entirely may never be conclusively established. But the uncertainty itself has become part of the story — a Kremlin that cannot say with confidence where the threat to its senior officers is coming from is a Kremlin that has already lost some of the control it depends on projecting.
For now, Varpakhovich remains hospitalized, the investigation remains open, and Moscow remains silent on the one detail — his name — that the rest of the world already believes it knows.
