A senior Russian cruise rocket engineer was shot dead near Moscow, with Ukrainian media reporting he was assassinated by Ukraines intelligence.Mikhail Shatsky wasfound dead in the Kuzminki forest park in the suburban area of Kotelniki southeast of Moscow this week.Shatsky was deputy chief of design and head of software application at the Moscow Experimental Design Bureau Mars, which develops automated control and navigation systems for satellites and unmanned aerial lorries.
Mars becomes part of Russias state nuclear corporation Rosatom.Exiled opposition journalist Alexander Nevzorov, who first broke the news of the assassination, said Shatsky also supervised upgrades of Kh-59 rockets into the low-flying subsonic Kh-69 versions.The Russian armed force is understood to use Kh-59, Kh-69 and Kh-101 missiles against Ukraine.
The Ukrainian air force stated Wednesday its systemsintercepted 2 Kh-59/ 69 rockets over the Dnipropetrovsk region.Several Ukrainian news outlets, including RBC and Ukrainska Pravda, reported mentioning anonymous sources that Shatsky was assassinated as part of a special operation by the Ukrainian militarys HUR defense intelligence agency.Anyone in any method associated with establishing Russias military-industrial complex and therefore supporting Russian aggressiveness versus Ukraine is a legitimate target for the [Ukrainian] defense forces, Hromadskequoted an anonymous security service source as saying.Russias investigative news site Important Storiessaid it had the ability to geolocate the site of Shatskys death as a 10-minute walk from his home in Kotelniki.