Founder of Russian paramilitary battalion killed in Moscow apartment complex blast

An explosion at an elite apartment complex in northwest Moscow on Monday morning has killed the founder of a Russian paramilitary military unit fighting in Ukraine and his bodyguard, state news agency TASS reported.

Armen Sarkisyan, the founder of the Arbat Battalion, a paramilitary unit reportedly made up of ethnic Armenians recruited from prisons, was killed when an explosive device with a yield of up to 1kg of TNT detonated in the lobby of his apartment building, TASS reported, calling Sarkisyan’s assassination “carefully planned”.

In a video taken in the immediate aftermath of the attack posted by Telegram channel Baza, people can be seen attending to an injured person lying on the floor of the lobby, with shattered glass from the explosion strewn everywhere.

At least four other people were injured in the blast, TASS reported, describing their condition as “serious”.

Sarkisyan was born in Armenia but moved to Horlivka, a city in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, in his youth. He has been on Ukraine’s wanted list since 2014 for allegedly paying agents provocateurs to incite violence during the 2014 Maidan protests in Kyiv, according to Ukrainska Pravda, which described him as “a crime lord” who had ties to ousted pro-Moscow Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

Described by Russian state media as “the head of the boxing federation in the Donetsk People’s Republic”, the name used by Moscow for the Russian-occupied Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, Sarkisyan was charged in absentia with “complicity with an aggressor state” and “voluntary participation in illegal armed groups” by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) in December.

According to the SBU, Sarkisyan set up the Arbat Battalion shortly after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, recruiting ex-convicts to fill its ranks. The battalion, which initially fought near the Donetsk region city of Toretsk, was subsequently transferred to Russia’s western Kursk region following Ukraine’s surprise incursion into Russian territory in August 2024.