The National Guard said that the security forces destroyed a militant armed to the teeth, who broke into a private house in the Moscow region and opened fire on them.
On Saturday, Russian security forces killed a heavily armed militant who broke into a private house on the outskirts of Moscow and opened fire on them, allegedly threatening to march on the Kremlin.
The assailant was spotted by security after he broke into an unoccupied house located in an elite cottage community in the Istra district, about 45 kilometers (less than 30 miles) west of Moscow. When two guards and a policeman entered the house, the man held them at gunpoint, but the three later managed to escape, Russian media reported.
For several hours, the authorities negotiated with the attacker, who was wearing camouflage and carrying a Kalashnikov assault rifle. The man claimed to have come from the front lines in Ukraine , and God prompted him to march on the Kremlin, the seat of government in Moscow.
He refused to surrender, shot at the special forces and was killed during the storming of the house, the National Guard reported. It said that the attacker had several machine guns and hand grenades.
Russian MP Alexander Khinshtein identified the attacker as Vyacheslav Chernenko, a 35-year-old resident of the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. It was not immediately clear whether he really fought in Ukraine, as he claimed.
The administrator of Istra, Tatyana Vitusheva, called the attacker mentally unbalanced.
Some Russian media claimed that the cottage he broke into once belonged to Viktor Yanukovych, the former pro-Moscow president of Ukraine, who was ousted from office amid mass protests and offered asylum to Russia. It was put up for sale by its current owner, who was overseas when the incident took place.
The standoff received intense media attention as it came almost a month after mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin launched a short-lived mutiny in which his Wagner units captured the military headquarters in the southern city of Rostov-on-Don and then advanced 200 kilometers. (125 miles) to Moscow, trying to overthrow the country’s top military leadership.
Prigozhin agreed to end the June 23-24 uprising as part of a deal that offered amnesty to him and his mercenaries and allowed them to move to Belarus.
Source: ABC News
