ANALYSIS – Was it a mistaken Ukrainian hit or a Russian job? It is sad either way. A former Russian submarine captain accused of war crimes in Ukraine has been assassinated in broad daylight while out jogging in an area close to Russian security and special forces facilities. (RELATED: Russian Lieutenant General Killed In Missile Strike)
Stanislav Rzhitskiy was found with four bullet wounds in his back near the Olimp sports complex in Krasnodar, in Southern Russia.
He was reportedly shot by a Soviet-era 9mm Makarov handgun with a suppressor (‘silencer’).
Russian media outlets speculated that Rzhitsky, 42, who previously commanded the Krasnador missile attack submarine named after the city, may have been tracked via his profile on the Strava fitness app.
That submarine, operating in the Black Sea, reportedly attacked the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia several times in July of last year with Kalibr missiles, and the deadliest of the strikes killed 28 people, including three children.
The Daily Mail reported that “Russian state TV claimed the submarine’s strikes had been the ‘most productive’ of the war, killing Colonel Oleg Makarchuk, 48, head of the Armaments and Logistics Service of the Ukrainian Air Force, and Colonel Dmitry Burdiko, another high-ranking air force commander, as they met in the so-called House of Officers in Vinnytsia.” (Weakened Tyrant Hints At Plan To Consolidate Power)
However, a good number of those killed in the Russian strikes were civilians.
The targeted assassination of Rzhitsky, who currently served as the civilian deputy chief of the department overseeing military mobilization in the southern city, was said to be Ukrainian payback for the missile strikes.
Russian investigators believe Rzhitsky’s running route was tracked by a jogging app he used and that the timing of the killing was linked to the upcoming first anniversary of the Kalibr attack on July 15. (RELATED: Attack Targets One Of World’s Busiest Airports – Shocking Foreign Adversary)
A screenshot from his profile on Strava last week maps out a 14-minute jog in the Russian city of Krasnodar.
Some Russian media claimed investigators believed the ex-sub commander’s assassination was “ordered from Ukraine” as retaliation for the missile strikes, but Rzhitsky’s father has said that his son resigned from the Russian Armed Forces in December 2021 – before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – and after a delay was formally discharged last August, according to the BBC.
“He didn’t take part in the [war] in any way,” his father was quoted saying.
And Ukraine denies it was involved, saying that Rzhitsky had angered the Russian military after refusing to carry out any more missile strikes on Ukraine due to the risks of civilian casualties.
In a statement reported by the Daily Beast, the Armed Forces of Ukraine claimed Rzhitsky was “eliminated by his own for refusing to further carry out the command’s combat orders.”
On Tuesday, Russian authorities reported that a man had been detained in connection to the killing, posting a video on Telegram of federal police raiding a home and cornering the alleged suspect, who was filmed cowering on the ground in his underwear.
Investigators on the Investigative Committee, together with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB, detained Sergey Denisenko, born in 1959. The 64-year-old married dad-of-six was born in Ukraine and is a former president of the Ukrainian Shotokan karate federation.
Denisenko allegedly and conveniently admitted to killing Rzhitsky on the orders of Ukrainian security services, according to reporting by the Russian Telegram news channel SHOT run by the Russian military.
But as the New York Post reported:
A source told the Russian Telegram news channel VCHK-OGPU that the assassin had chosen “an extremely strange place” to carry out the hit — just a few steps away from the Krasnodar office of the Russian security service FSB and the Alpha special forces’ base.
“According to the investigation, the killer then went to a trolley stop along Kubanskaya Embankment Street,” the source said. “The stop is located across from the fence of the Krasnodar branch of the Alpha special forces.”
Members of the nearby FSB Special Forces Center often jog in the park where Rzhitsky was gunned down, and that entire area is said to be crammed with CCTV cameras…
It now turns out that Rzhitsky’s dad was right. It seems command of the Krasnodar missile sub had been passed on to Captain Anatoliy Varochkin, 46, before the 14 July 2022 attack.
If they were going after the man who launched the missile strikes against Vinnytsia, they got the wrong guy, hence why Ukraine won’t admit it was behind it. If they were going after the man who resigned from the Russian Navy rather than attack civilians, they got the right guy.
Either way, it is a tragedy.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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FSB Hit job via Putin
Awwwww
And another one bites the dust!