Russian investigative media outlet The Insider confirmed that the victim of a car bombing on Tuesday was Damir Davydov, a Russian military official responsible for supplying missile and artillery ammunition to the front.
Davydov, the Defense Ministry’s head of missile and artillery command, was reportedly killed when his BMW X3 was blown up near a high-rise building in the Moscow suburb of Balashikha at around 5:30 a.m.
Earlier, Russian authorities confirmed the explosion and opened a criminal case, but had not yet disclosed the victim’s identity, leaving multiple Telegram channels to speculate whether the victim was a senior officer in Russia’s Aerospace Forces, Alexander Maksimtsev.
Early reports suggest the blast, which had a power equivalent to about 400 grams of TNT, occurred less than a kilometer from where Lieutenant General Yaroslav Moskalik was killed in a nearly identical car bombing in the same military residential district just over a year ago. This is the fourth killing of a Russian officer at the rank of lieutenant general inside Russia since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.