A senior Russian draft officer and former submarine commander accused by Ukraine of deadly strikes on its territory has been shot dead while jogging in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar.
Stanislav Rzhitsky, 42, was killed on Monday by an unidentified gunman during a morning run in a park near the Olimp sports centre, local police said.
Russian FSB security services said on Tuesday that a 64-year-old man was arrested on suspicion of carrying out the attack.
At the time of his death, Rzhitsky was serving as the deputy head of the Krasnodar city administration’s mobilisation.
According to the Russian daily newspaper Kommersant, Rzhitsky was previously the commander of the Krasnodar submarine, named after the city, in the Russian navy.
The Ukrainian army said in a Telegram post on Tuesday that Rzhitsky was in command of a submarine that carried out a deadly missile attack on the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia in July 2022, killing 23 civilians.
Rzhitsky’s father told the Baza, a Russian Telegram channel with links to the security services, that his son left the military in December 2021, before Russia invaded Ukraine. Several close friends of Rzhitsky similarly told the independent Russian station Dozdh that Rzhitsky left the military before the war started.
Baza further reported that the killer could have tracked Rzhitsky’s runs on the Strava app, as he regularly followed the same 4-mile route while running.
The Ukrainian defence ministry’s main directorate of intelligence, GUR, did not claim responsibility for Rzhitsky’s death. But in a cryptic message, GUR shared a series of details about the killing, including the time of the attack (6am) and the lack of witnesses because of rain.
“Due to heavy rain, the park was deserted, so there were no witnesses who could provide details or identify the attacker,” the GUR said.
In a later statement, the agency’s chief, Kyrylo Budanov, rejected the claim that Ukrainian intelligence was behind the killing. “Statements by some media and politicians that the GUR has something to do with the death of Stanislav Rzhitsky have no basis,” Budanov said.
Ukraine typically declines to claim responsibility for attacks on Russia or Russian-annexed Crimea, though Kyiv officials have frequently celebrated such attacks with cryptic or mocking remarks.
US intelligence has previously said the Ukrainian government authorised last year’s car bomb attack that killed Darya Dugina, the daughter of the prominent Russian nationalist Alexander Dugin.
• This article was amended on 12 July 2023 to make clear that friends of Rzhitsky said he had left the military, not just the army as an earlier version had stated, before the war started.
