Hours after an explosion at an upscale Moscow apartment complex killed the founder of a unit fighting on Russia’s side in the war against Ukraine, it was unclear who was behind the blast, but two theories immediately came to the fore.
It could have been a gangland-style killing linked to business or criminal disputes — the kind of bloody violence that many associate with the cutthroat chaos of the ’90s but that has erupted repeatedly over President Vladimir Putin’s 25-year rule and may be on the rise as the invasion of Ukraine alters and chokes off money streams.
Or, observers said, it could have been a targeted assassination organized by Kyiv — the latest in a series of attacks and killings on Russian soil that Ukraine’s state Security Service, the SBU, has acknowledged responsibility or been blamed for since Putin ordered the full-scale invasion three years ago this month.
Either way, the blast that killed businessman Armen Sarkisian points to vulnerabilities that Russia has exposed itself to as the Kremlin focuses on its effort to subjugate Ukraine. Violent disputes and turf wars may once have seemed destined to disappear, but they continue to occur, undermining Putin’s claim to have brought stability to the country.
A glaring example is the still-simmering conflict over control of Wildberries, Russia’s largest online retailer, whose Moscow office was the site of a violent and chaotic confrontation in September in which two guards were shot dead.
The explosion on February 3 shattered panes of glass at an entrance to Alye Parusa, or Scarlet Sails, a large and tony complex in northwestern Moscow. Sarkisian died after being hospitalized in critical condition, Russian authorities said. One other person was killed and two were injured, according to TASS.
The Armenian-born Sarkisian was a reputed crime boss and president of the boxing federation in the Russian-occupied part of Ukraine’s Donetsk region, where he moved with his family in his youth. He was also known as Armen Gorlovsky, after the Russian name for the city where they lived and where he gained sway as an adult, Horlivka.
Sarkisian worked his way up in a criminal group run by a boss from a nearby city in the early 2000s, according to Ukrainian media reports. He reportedly led hostile takeovers of several local media outlets in 2009 and later controlled industrial facilities, including a coal producer and a machine-building plant.
In February 2024, Sarkisian was involved in a confrontation with a mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter from the Chechnya region in which three people were injured in an exchange of gunfire after a traffic accident in central Moscow.
At the same time, Sarkisian’s ties to Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine were deep. Following the full-scale invasion in February 2022, he founded a unit known as Arbat — short for Armenian Battalion — that is now part of Redut, a mercenary network backed by the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU.
He was wanted by Ukraine, which in December formally accused him of being a member of an illegal armed force and aiding the “aggressor state,” meaning Russia. Those charges stemmed from his involvement with Arbat, but Ukraine’s accusations against him go back to 2014.
In an announcement of those allegations, the SBU said Sarkisian had been wanted since May 2014 for “organizing murders in the center of Kyiv,” a reference to violent crackdowns on protests known as the Maidan, or the Euromaidan movement, in which authorities say more than 100 people were killed earlier that year.
The crime boss Sarkisian had worked for was allegedly a top supplier of hired muscle — plain-clothes “titushki” used by the state to provoke and carry out violence against Maidan protesters — and some in Ukraine have alleged that Sarkisian, with his boxing connections, was involved in recruiting young men for this role.
The SBU said that Sarkisian was a “member of the inner circle” of former President Viktor Yanukovych, who was driven from power by the Maidan protests — sparked in large part by his decision to drop plans for closer ties with the European Union and turn toward Moscow instead.
Without providing evidence, the SBU said the Arbat unit was made up mainly of convicted criminals and that in order to enable Sarkisian to recruit manpower for the battalion, he had been given authority over prisons in the occupied part of the Donetsk region. The unit reportedly also includes members of the defunct mercenary group Wagner.
Like many on Russia’s side on the front lines, Arbat’s commander, former MMA fighter Aik Gasparyan, came to the war from behind bars. He was sentenced to seven years in a maximum-security prison in 2020 after being convicted of an attempted armed robbery at a Moscow café, according to court documents. But he was sprung after the start of the full-scale invasion and by December 2022 had received a medal “for courage” from Putin.
The SBU said the Arbat battalion has fought near Toretsk in the Donetsk region and more recently in Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces hold swaths of territory after crossing the border in a surprise incursion last August.
In the hours following the February 3 blast, there was no claim of responsibility from the SBU or any other organization, Ukrainian or otherwise. But speculation that Kyiv could have been behind the explosion was fueled by past attacks and assassinations that Ukrainian intelligence have acknowledged — often indirectly — or been accused of carrying out inside Russia since the start of the full-scale invasion.
Most strikingly, the SBU informally claimed responsibility for the killing of the general in charge of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Defense Forces, and his assistant in the explosion of a bomb concealed in a scooter outside a building in Moscow on December 17. An SBU source told RFE/RL that the blast was the result of an operation by the agency.
Aided by higher numbers of soldiers, weapons, and ammunition, Russian forces are pressing forward in the Donetsk region and, in addition to the Crimean Peninsula, hold most of the Luhansk region and parts of the Zaporizhzhya and Kherson regions, further southwest.
For Ukraine, the killings of figures Kyiv accuses of playing a role in Russia’s aggression are one of the elements of a campaign of attacks and sabotage inside Russia, which analysts say are meant to hurt Russia’s economy and its war effort while sending a message to Russian, Ukrainians, and the West about its ability to fight back against a much larger adversary.
Sergei Dobrynin, Yauhen Lehalau, and Mark Krutov of RFE/RL’s Russian Service contributed to this report
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