Russian Colonel Blown Up in St. Petersburg as Attacks on Military Figures Mount

The explosion occurred around 7 a.m. on Kolpinskoye Highway in the Shushary district, near a Lenta supermarket and a Tatneft gas station. Fontanka, citing an informed source, reported that an improvised explosive device attached to the vehicle's underside was triggered remotely as the officer pulled out of his courtyard. The Investigative Committee confirmed a serviceman's death and opened a murder investigation but has not released his name or rank. Russian media identified him as a colonel serving as chief navigator of the 6th Air Force and Air Defense Army.

This marks the second car bombing targeting a Russian military aviator in the Slavyanka area in less than three months. On August 27, Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Sechkov of the 332nd Separate Guards Helicopter Regiment was killed and his wife seriously injured when their vehicle exploded on the same highway. Sechkov had reportedly told superiors he was on a potential assassination list and routinely inspected his car before driving. Fontanka later reported that a 24-year-old woman allegedly planted that device before fleeing to Turkey and then Moldova; the investigation's progress was never publicly clarified. Ukraine's military intelligence had accused Sechkov's regiment in May 2022 of conducting missile and bomb strikes against civilians in the Sumy and Kharkiv regions.

The killings fit a widening pattern of targeted attacks on Russian military personnel since the full-scale invasion began. In December 2024, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, head of Russia's radiological, chemical and biological defense forces, was killed by a bomb hidden in a scooter near his Moscow apartment — an operation Ukraine explicitly claimed. In April 2025, Lieutenant General Yaroslav Moskalik, deputy head of the General Staff's Main Operational Directorate, died in a car bombing in Balashikha near Moscow; Ukrainian officials subsequently indicated their intelligence services carried out the operation. That same month, a car bomb killed Yevgeny Rytikov, a senior engineer developing Russia's Krasukha electronic warfare systems. In December 2025, Lieutenant General Fanil Sarvarov was killed by a car bomb outside his home 16 kilometers from the Kremlin. In February 2026, Lieutenant General Vladimir Alexeyev, first deputy head of the Main Directorate of the Russian General Staff, was shot dead.

Slavyanka itself reveals the strategic logic: developed partly to house military personnel, the neighborhood saw the Russian Ministry of Defense own nearly a third of residential property under construction by 2012. The concentration of officers in identifiable residential zones creates persistent targeting opportunities. Petersburg attacks, and Ukrainian intelligence sources have neither confirmed nor denied involvement in the latest bombing. The Investigative Committee's forensic examination continues, but the recurrence — same neighborhood, same method, same service branch — suggests a sustained campaign rather than isolated incidents.