Russian lieutenant general shot by assailant in Moscow, investigators say
Russian Police officers walk next to the entrance of a residential building on Volokolamsk Highway, where an assassination attempt on General Lieutenant Alexeyev (Alekseev) was made earlier in the morning, on February 6, 2026, in Moscow, . (Photo by Contributor/Getty Images)
(LONDON) — Lt. Gen. Vladimir Alexeyev, a high-ranking Defense Ministry official, was shot and injured in an ambush-style attack on Friday in a residential area of Moscow, according to the Investigative Committee of Russia and state-affiliated media.
“According to investigators, on Feb. 6, 2026, in a residential building located on Volokolamskoye Highway in Moscow, an as-yet-unidentified individual fired several shots at a man and fled the scene,” Svetlana Petrenko, the committee’s spokesperson, said in Russian on the Telegram messaging app.
The victim was transported to a local hospital, Petrenko said. She did not immediately describe the extent of his injuries.
State-affiliated news outlet TASS identified the victim as Alexeyev, adding that a criminal investigation had been launched.
“Special services are currently doing their job,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said. “Of course, this has been reported to the head of state. We wish the general a speedy recovery.”
Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, claimed without evidence that Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, may be responsible for the shooting. He suggested that it may be an attempt by Ukraine to disrupt negotiations between Washington, Kyiv and Moscow.
“The regime is ready to do anything to convince its Western sponsors not to lag behind the United States in their desire to derail the process of achieving a just settlement,” Lavrov told reporters at a briefing on Friday.
ABC News’ Joe Simonetti, Dragana Jovanovic and Anna Sergeeva contributed to this report.
Firefighters extinguish fires after Russian drone attacked residential areas in Sumy, northeastern Ukraine, in February 11, 2026. (State Emergency Service of Ukraine / Handout /Anadolu via Getty Images)
(LONDON) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Wednesday that another night of Russian long-range strikes further undermined “trust in all diplomatic efforts to end this war,” as the sides continue to maneuver for advantage in ongoing U.S.-led peace negotiations.
Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched 129 drones into Ukraine overnight into Wednesday morning, of which 112 were shot down or suppressed. Fifteen drones impacted across eight locations, the air force said.
Zelenskyy said in a post to Telegram that drones attacked the Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Sumy, Dnipro and Poltava regions.
Ukraine’s State Emergency Service (SES) said that four people were killed, three of them children, by a Russian drone strike on a residential building in the northeastern city of Kharkiv. Two other people were injured in the attack, the SES said.
Two people were killed and nine others by Russian strikes in the northeastern Sumy region, according to regional Gov. Oleg Hryhorov.
The SES also reported a drone attack on a residential property in the southern city of Zaporozhzhia, in which at least five people were injured. Zelenskyy said that the attack in the city also damaged a hospital.
Oleksandr Prokudin, the governor of the southern Kherson region, said six people were injured there by Russian shelling.
Each night of attacks “proves that it is only through tough pressure on Russia and clear security guarantees for Ukraine that we can put an end to the killings,” Zelenskyy said in a post to social media.
“Until the pressure on the aggressor is insufficient and until our, Ukraine’s security is not guaranteed, nothing else will work,” he added. “The Russian army is not preparing to stop — they are preparing to continue fighting.”
The Ukrainian president again called for Western partners to provide more air defense support to Ukraine to help blunt Russian attacks and “protect life.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry, meanwhile, said its forces shot down 118 Ukrainian drones over 15 regions overnight.
Russia’s federal air transport agency, Rosaviatsiya, said that temporary flight restrictions were introduced at airports in Cheboksary, Kaluga, Kazan, Saratov, Volgograd, Ulyanovsk and Nizhnekamsk.
Two people were injured in a drone attack on the western Belgorod region, which borders Ukraine, Gov. Vyacheslav Gladkov reported in a post to Telegram.
In the southern region of Volgograd, Gov. Andrey Bocharov reported a fire at an industrial site in the south of the region, plus drone damage to an apartment building and a kindergarten.
Andriy Kovalenko, the head of the Counter-Disinformation Center operating as part of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, suggested in a post to Telegram that an attack occurred at a major oil refinery in the Volgograd area.
Both sides have continued their long-range strike campaigns despite recent trilateral peace talks with U.S. representatives. All participants at last week’s second round of trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi described the meetings as constructive, but the negotiations did not appear to achieve a breakthrough on several contentious points.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov this week continued his recent criticism of ongoing peace negotiations.
In an interview published on Wednesday, Lavrov alleged to the Kremlin-aligned Empathy Manuchi online project that Kyiv and its European partners are sabotaging what he called the “balance of vital interests” agreed between Russia and the U.S. at the August summit between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska.
Putin and his top officials have repeatedly referred back to the “spirit and letter” of the Anchorage summit amid Trump’s efforts to hammer out a peace deal. The meeting was widely interpreted as a diplomatic and political coup for Putin.
Lavrov — as quoted by Russia’s state-run Tass news agency — claimed that the understandings reached in Alaska made it “entirely possible to quickly agree on a final agreement on a settlement,” but accused Kyiv and its European partners of trying to “turn it all to their advantage.”
Moscow, he said, will take steps to “ensure our own security.” Russia has demanded that Ukrainian forces withdraw from all of the partially-occupied Donetsk and Luhansk regions — which together form the Donbas region — as a part of any peace deal. Kyiv has refused the demand.
Lavrov said that Ukrainian troops “will eventually be driven out” of the area regardless.
Fires are lit as protesters rally on January 8, 2026 in Tehran, Iran. (Anonymous/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — An extraordinarily violent crackdown by Iranian security forces appears to have succeeded for now in driving protesters from the streets, according to activists and analysts who managed to speak with people inside the country despite the information blackout.
Demonstrations began in late December with protesters chanting in Tehran against rising inflation and the falling value of the national currency before spreading across Iran and becoming more explicitly anti-government. Authorities have shut down the internet in Iran for more than a week as security forces moved to crush the protests.
The internet blackout in Iran continues to make it very difficult to get a clear picture from the ground, but accounts are emerging from people now able to use phone lines, those few with access to working Starlink satellite terminals and Iranians who have recently left the country.
These people describe an eerie calm over Iran’s cities, where heavily armed security forces are deployed on the streets enforcing what many are describing as a de-facto curfew.
Mehdi Yahyanejad, an Iranian activist based in Washington, D.C., says he has helped send in hundreds of Starlink terminals to citizen journalists and others in Iran to help get around the government blackout.
“Unfortunately, the crackdown has been so severe the protests have pretty much come to a halt,” he said told ABC News on Thursday.
“There are security forces everywhere — there is a state of fear,” said Yahyanejad, who co-founded Net Freedom Pioneers, an anti-censorship group.
The smothering of the protests would seem to make U.S. military intervention less likely. President Donald Trump initially signaled there could be possible U.S. military action in support of protesters.
Yahyanejad said in the past few days there are still signs of dissent — people were heard chanting anti-regime slogans from windows. In some neighborhoods groups of youths have also gathered and shouted slogans, before quickly fleeing when security forces arrive.
The death toll from the crackdown continues to grow as more information comes out. The D.C.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, HRANA, now puts it at more than 3,308 protesters killed since Dec. 28.
A total of 24,266 people have been arrested in the protests since they began, including 2,107 injured protesters with serious wounds, according to HRANA.
ABC News cannot independently verify these numbers. Although there have not been signs of major demonstrations in recent days, human rights groups are continuing to verify the identities of those killed over the weeks of unrest.
The Islamic Republic has not released a death toll, but Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Saturday that thousands have been killed. Other Iranian authorities have said before that two-thirds of those dead are “martyrs” killed by protesters that they describe as “terrorists” and “mercenary agents of Israel and the U.S.”
Yahyanejad said while there was intense anger under the surface still, he doubted the protests would restart unless the U.S. launched strikes.
“I think if there is no action from the U.S., I don’t think they are going to come back that soon,” he said.
Regarding a possible U.S. response, President Donald Trump told reporters Friday afternoon that it was not Arab and Israeli officials who convinced him not to strike Iran, but that he made the decision himself not to strike the country.
“Nobody convinced me. I convinced myself,” Trump said.
Trump applauded the Iranian regime for what he claims is the cancellation of over 800 scheduled hangings on Thursday, according to what he said “are very important sources on the other side.”
“I greatly respect the fact that all scheduled hangings, which were to take place yesterday (Over 800 of them), have been cancelled by the leadership of Iran,” Trump said on his social media platform Friday.
The head of Iran’s judiciary, Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, had suggested Wednesday that there would be expedited trials and executions for those who have been arrested in the nationwide protests. The Iranian government has yet to comment on Trump’s claim that the scheduled hangings have been halted.
Concerns about the safety of injured protesters There are fears the arrests are just beginning as the regime moves to round up protesters, activists and independent analysts told ABC News.
Injured people are frightened to visit hospitals or clinics because security officers are waiting for them there, according to Yahyanejad.
There are also allegations that during the mass killing, some severely injured protesters were removed from hospitals and executed, according to activists and analysts. The accusations are based on videos that show bodies still intubated or with catheters, but with bullet wounds to the head.
Reviewing the pictures of the bodies, Yasser Ghorashi, an Iranian doctor, told ABC News that hospitals in Iran never send a body to the morgue without removing all medical tools and devices.
The Toronto-based Iranian doctor said that he had been in touch with doctors inside the country who reported security forces had raided hospitals and taken injured protesters.
Their accounts match videos verified by ABC News that shows security forces raiding hospitals in Ilam, a city in west Iran, during the early days of the protests.
Firefighters at the scene in Highfield Road, Golders Green, London, after an apparent arson attack on four ambulances belonging to the Jewish Community Ambulance service in London. The Metropolitan Police confirmed the incident is being treated as an antisemitic hate crime. Picture date: Monday March 23, 2026. (Photo by Jonathan Brady/PA Images via Getty Images)
(LONDON) — Two men were arrested in connection with an arson attack on a Jewish charity’s ambulances in the north London neighborhood of Golders Green, British police said on Wednesday.
The men — aged 47 and 45 — were taken into custody Wednesday morning at separate addresses in northwest and central London, police said.
Both were arrested on suspicion of arson with intent to endanger life and have been taken to a London police station where they’re being held, according to London’s Metropolitan Police Service, which noted that its officers are conducting searches at the two addresses.
Four ambulances used by Hatzola, a volunteer-led ambulance service in north London, were set on fire just about 1:30 a.m. on Monday morning, police said. Three masked or hooded individuals were seen setting the fires, police said.
Investigators said that they were combing through hours of CCTV footage related to the case, in part to “trace the suspects’ movements.”
“This appears to be an important breakthrough in the investigation, but we’re also mindful that CCTV footage of the incident suggests there were at least three people involved,” Cmdr. Helen Flanagan, Head of Counter Terrorism Policing London, who is leading the investigation, said in a statement.
An investigations was still underway, Flanagan added, saying the Met would “seek to arrest all of those who may have been involved.”
Officials said that the arson attack was being treated as an antisemitic hate crime, although it had not as been designated a terrorist incident as of the police’s most recent update, which was published on Monday.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer described the attack as “horrifying,” saying on social media on Monday that it appeared to be a “shocking antisemitic arson attack.”
“An attack on our Jewish community is an attack on us all,” Starmer said. “We will fight the poison that is antisemitism.”
