Putin Fled to His Bunker as His Most Feared Men Were Eliminated in Moscow… Then This Happened
MOSCOW — At around seven in the morning on September 3, a man on a motorcycle rode up to a house in Probuzhdeniye, a village on the edge of Engels in Russia’s Saratov region, and fired two shots at a Russian officer walking nearby. One bullet struck the man in the torso, the other in the face. His driver was wounded too. The gunman rode off and has not been found.
Russia’s Investigative Committee confirmed only that it had opened a case over an “attempt on the life of a serviceman” in Engels, declining to name the victim. But Russian Telegram channels, followed by outlets including Meduza, The Moscow Times and United24, quickly identified him as Major General Nikolai Varpakhovich, commander of the 22nd Guards Heavy Bomber Aviation Division — the unit based at Engels-2 that flies the Tu-95MS and Tu-160 strategic bombers responsible for a large share of Russia’s cruise-missile campaign against Ukrainian cities. The timing made the attack especially pointed: just three days earlier, on August 31, Ukraine’s Security Service had formally accused Varpakhovich, in absentia, of issuing the combat order for the July 8, 2024, Kh-101 missile strike that hit Kyiv’s Okhmatdyt children’s hospital, killing and wounding dozens of people in one of the war’s most internationally condemned attacks. The European Union has separately sanctioned him over the same strike.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did not claim the attack directly. But in remarks the same day, he said Ukraine “will also carry out our own asymmetric operations in response to these Russian tactics,” adding that Russian war criminals “will be found” wherever they try to hide — a formulation that, by the account of analysts who track his public statements closely, was understood as a clear if deniable nod toward what had just happened in Saratov.
A Pattern Years in the Making
The Engels shooting is, by most independent counts, at least the sixth attack on a senior Russian military or security figure since the war’s early phase, part of a campaign that has increasingly reached targets far from the front line, in cities long considered secure. Independent Russian outlet Meduza has compiled a partial record of the pattern: Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, commander of Russia’s nuclear, biological and chemical protection forces, was killed in December 2024 by a bomb hidden in an electric scooter outside his Moscow apartment — an attack Ukraine’s SBU publicly claimed responsibility for, after a Ukrainian court had sentenced Kirillov in absentia for alleged use of banned chemical weapons. Four months later, in April 2025, Lt. Gen. Yaroslav Moskalik, a deputy head of the Russian General Staff’s main operational directorate, was killed by a car bomb in a Moscow suburb. Russian officials confirmed both killings and, in Kirillov’s case, arrested a suspect they said had been recruited and paid by Ukrainian intelligence.
Reports circulating in 2026 point to a continuing pattern: a senior GRU department official targeted near Balashikha outside Moscow in June, a brigadier general shot at a restaurant in central Moscow in early August, and the chief of staff of a helicopter regiment targeted inside a car in St. Petersburg weeks later. Each case features different methods and different cities, but analysts tracking the pattern note a consistent signature: officers associated with alleged war crimes struck in the moments they likely felt most secure — outside their own homes, in familiar neighborhoods, far from any battlefield.
Ukrainian officials have pointed to what they describe as a systematic foundation behind the campaign: a database, reportedly known informally as the “Book of Executioners,” compiling records on tens of thousands of Russian personnel linked to alleged war crimes. Ukrainian officials have characterized the list as a long-term account that, in their framing, will eventually be settled name by name — a doctrine of methodical accountability rather than opportunistic violence.
How the Targets Are Found
Analysts who study the campaign describe it as a fusion of digital intelligence gathering with quiet networks operating inside Russia itself. Leaked data, phone records and app-tracking information can, over months, map an officer’s daily routine in granular detail — which route he drives, when he leaves for work, which entrances he uses. A location shared inadvertently through a fitness app, a delivery address, a bodyguard’s unlocked phone: any of these can become the thread that eventually leads an operation to its target, often without the officer or those around him ever realizing they’ve been compromised. When that digital groundwork is combined with human networks operating locally, analysts argue, even a residence protected for months by routine security measures can become vulnerable in a matter of minutes.
The effect on Russian officialdom extends well beyond the officers directly targeted. Every officer who has served in Ukraine, or whose name has been publicly linked to a single contested strike, now lives with the awareness that they could be on a list somewhere — a psychological toll that analysts argue may be doing as much damage to Russian military effectiveness as the physical losses themselves, by slowing the confidence and decision-making of officers who no longer trust that rank or geography offers real protection.
A Kremlin Turning Inward
The atmosphere inside Russia’s security establishment, according to reporting on the response, has shifted accordingly. Putin has reportedly expanded his own presidential security detail, the FSO, to record levels — a fourth expansion since the war began, after the unit’s size had remained essentially unchanged for 13 years before 2022. The Financial Times has reported that the Kremlin now formally assesses the risk of an assassination attempt or drone strike against Putin himself as high, prompting sharply reduced travel, a phone ban imposed on close staff, and security protocols requiring visitors to remove even wristwatches before entering his presence.
That heightened paranoia has reportedly deepened Russia’s reliance on the FSB’s internal security apparatus — consistent with Bloomberg’s August reporting on the agency’s expanding, largely unchecked authority to investigate virtually anyone in the country, including members of the elite. Analysts argue this creates a corrosive cycle: the more the Kremlin empowers internal security services to root out disloyalty among officers and oligarchs, the more it generates fear rather than trust — and a leadership that visibly suspects its own military increasingly finds that suspicion returned in kind.
Two Nooses, Not One
The uncertainty over who exactly is behind each individual attack has become, in the assessment of analysts who study the pattern, part of what makes the campaign so unsettling for Moscow. While Ukraine has directly claimed several of the killings as acts of what it frames as asymmetric justice against war criminals, other cases — including the Engels shooting, which Ukraine has notably declined to claim — leave open the possibility that some attacks reflect internal Kremlin score-settling, elite infighting, or FSB purges rather than Ukrainian operations at all. That ambiguity, analysts argue, may serve Kyiv’s interests regardless of its actual involvement in every case: a Kremlin unable to distinguish an external hand from an internal reckoning is a Kremlin forced to suspect everyone around it, a dynamic that erodes trust in a system built almost entirely on hierarchy and control.
Reporting on Putin’s private state of mind — including The Economist’s account of Kremlin-adjacent sources describing him telling associates that failure in the war could see him hanged — has generally framed that fear as rooted in mass public anger. The pattern of attacks on his own officer corps suggests a second, narrower source of the same anxiety: a class of generals who, unlike oligarchs able to move their wealth and flee abroad, have nowhere to go if the war turns against them, and reportedly little in the way of a legal shield that could protect them from being targeted regardless of any Kremlin assurance that international courts have no jurisdiction over their conduct. For a system that Russian tradition, as one Moscow-based analyst put it, tolerates violence and brutality within but never forgives failure, that combination — nowhere to run externally, and diminishing trust internally — may prove far more corrosive to the war effort than any single battlefield loss.
None of this points to an imminent unraveling of Putin’s control. But the accumulation of attacks on figures once considered untouchable, paired with a security apparatus turning its scrutiny inward on its own elite, describes a Kremlin increasingly consumed by a threat it cannot clearly locate — uncertain whether the next blow will come from Kyiv, or from somewhere much closer to home.
