A senior Russian military officer has been killed in a suspected car bomb attack in St Petersburg, on the same morning that US peace envoys arrived in Moscow for talks with President Vladimir Putin. The Russian colonel car bomb blast happened in the Shushary settlement on the southern outskirts of Russia’s second city.
A car exploded on the morning of Thursday, November 12, on the Kolpinskoye highway in Shushary, a settlement on the outskirts of St Petersburg. The Main Investigative Directorate of the Investigative Committee for St Petersburg said the blast killed a Russian serviceman in the Pushkinsky district and opened a murder case. The official statement did not give his rank or identity. Fontanka, a St Petersburg outlet, reported that the dead man was a colonel and that he died at the scene.
Device Detonated Remotely, Reports Say
According to Fontanka, the explosive device was fixed under the vehicle’s underside and set off remotely as the officer was pulling out of a courtyard, and the moment of the blast was captured on camera. The blast was recorded by an intercom camera in the Slavyanka neighbourhood at about 7:00 a.m. local time, near a Lenta hypermarket on Kolpinskoye Highway. TV channel 78 reported that the dead colonel was the chief navigator of the 6th Air Force and Air Defence Army, a formation that has carried out attacks in the Kharkiv region. A family member who was near the car was reported injured and taken to hospital.
Officials have not disclosed the officer’s identity, and none of the reporting names a suspect or a party responsible. The origin of the blast was still undetermined in the reporting, and investigators have opened a murder probe to determine whether a reported under-vehicle, remotely detonated explosive was used.
Echoes of an Earlier Attack
The blast recalls a similar explosion on the same highway on August 27, which killed a lieutenant colonel while his wife survived. Fontanka reported that a 24-year-old Russian woman who later travelled to Turkey is suspected of planting the earlier bomb, but law enforcement agencies have not officially commented on that investigation. The killing fits a wider pattern of attacks on Russian officers and pro-war figures since the 2022 invasion, although no official evidence establishing responsibility for this attack has been made public.
The timing is striking: the blast came hours before US envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff sat down with Putin in Moscow. For more on the Moscow talks, see our report on the Abu Dhabi peace talks entering their second day, and for more on Russia-related cases, see the US Army officer arrested in Britain over suspected Russia spying.
