Russia’s Kh-69 cruise missile developer shot dead near Moscow

A senior Russian missile developer has been eliminated in Moscow region during a special operation by Ukraine’s military intelligence, a defense source told Liga. According to Liga’s source in Ukraine’s Defense Forces, Mikhail Shatsky, deputy chief designer and head of the software department at Moscow’s Mars design bureau, was shot in Kuzminki forest park near Kotelniki, Moscow Oblast.

The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) and the Defense Ministry’s HUR have been actively targeting Russian officers implicated in war crimes and collaborators in Russian-occupied areas. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, multiple reports have documented successful operations by Ukrainian partisans and alleged intelligence units, including the assassinations of high-ranking military officials and key collaborators. The agencies never report their involvement in the assassinations of Russian military-industrial complex-linked individuals.

Militarnyi reports that this information correlates with local media reports about the shooting and killing of a middle-aged man on 11 December in the same area.

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Main Directorate of Intelligence (HUR) neither confirmed nor denied the media reports regarding its involvement in the operation.

Russia’s Federal State Unitary Enterprise “Moscow Experimental Design Bureau ‘Mars’,” a subsidiary of Rosatom since December 2017 (formerly under Roscosmos), develops onboard automatic control and navigation systems for aerospace vehicles, including guidance systems for Raduga’s air-launched Kh-69 cruise missile based on the late Soviet-era Kh-59.

Liga’s source told that Shatsky was involved in modernizing Russian cruise missiles. He was working on upgrading Kh-59 cruise missiles to Kh-69 standard and developing new drones.

The source noted that Shatsky’s colleagues considered him the chief ideologist for implementing artificial intelligence in drones and other Russian aircraft and spacecraft.

The source of the Liga reportedly concluded that any person involved in developing Russia’s military-industrial complex and thus supporting Russian aggression against Ukraine is a legitimate target for Ukraine’s Defense Forces.

According to Militarnyi, the Kh-69 missile was developed after Russia’s full-scale invasion and was first used to strike Ukrainian cities in October 2024.

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