A Russian general was killed by a car bomb on Friday, Russia’s top criminal investigation agency said, in the second such attack on a top Russian military officer in four months.

The Investigative Committee said that Lt. Gen. Yaroslav Moskalik, a deputy head of the main operational department in the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, was killed by an explosive device placed in his car in Balashikha, just outside Moscow.

The committee’s spokesperson, Svetlana Petrenko, said that the explosive device was rigged with shrapnel. She said that investigators were at the scene.

Russian media ran videos of a vehicle burning in the courtyard of an apartment building.

The committee did not mention possible suspects.

Russian foreign ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova described Moskalik’s killing as a “terror attack”.

The attack follows the killing of Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, who died on December 17 when a bomb hidden on an electric scooter parked outside his apartment building exploded as he left for his office. The Russian authorities blamed Ukraine for the killing of Kirillov, and Ukraine’s security agency acknowledged that it was behind that attack.

Kirillov was the chief of Russia’s Radiation, Biological and Chemical Protection Forces, the special troops tasked with protecting the military from the enemy’s use of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons and ensuring operations in a contaminated environment. Kirillov’s assistant also died in the attack.

US envoy meets Putin

US President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff met President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Friday to discuss a US plan to end the Ukraine war on terms that Kyiv and its European allies fear are too advantageous to Moscow.

Witkoff has emerged as US’s key interlocutor with Putin as Trump pushes for a deal to end the war, now well into its fourth year, and has already held 3 meetings with Putin.

His latest trip follows talks this week at which Ukrainian and European officials pushed back against some of the US proposals for how to settle the conflict, the deadliest in Europe since World War Two.

Video published by the Kremlin showed Witkoff and Putin shaking hands before sitting down on opposite sides of a white oval table.