Like every morning, submarine commander Stanislav Rzhitsky ran through a park near the sports center of Krasnodar, a city in southern Russia. His killer was already waiting for him there. He shot Rzhitsky four times in the chest and back, according to local media. Rzhitsky died immediately. It was an execution.
The independent Russian news portal Baza wrote that the assassin tracked down Rzhitsky via the sports app Strava. “He was constantly uploading his runs… and he almost always ran the same route. Thanks largely to this fact, it would not have been difficult for his killer to choose a suitable spot for the crime.”
Stanislav Rzhitsky was incredibly carefree. The danger of training apps for the military is well known, at least since US soldiers revealed the location of their bases in 2018 through their numerous jogging laps in the wasteland.
Strava, like many other services, has pulled out of Belarus and Russia, but users are bypassing the ban by using VPN access. You are then in Russia, but thanks to the VPN network, your device appears on the Internet in any country in the world.
Rzhitsky was commander of the Krasnodar submarine. The submarine has regularly fired Kalibr cruise missiles at Ukraine. Including those who killed 27 civilians in the city of Vinnytsia in central Ukraine last July. However, his family told local media that Rzhitsky had not been involved in any cruise missile operations. He reportedly submitted his retirement from the military in December 2021 and then served at a base in Crimea until August last year. After that he worked for the city administration in Krasnodar. Krasnodar is landlocked and is not a submarine base.
A man was arrested Tuesday night in connection with the attack. Videos show police officers bursting into a house and arresting a man in his underwear. The man arrested is called Stanislav Denisov and is said to be the former head of the National Karate Federation of Ukraine. He is said to have lived in Bucha, the city where Russian soldiers killed and tortured civilians last year.
The head of the Ukrainian secret service Kyrylo Budanov denied any connection to the crime, but revealed elsewhere that the secret service had a death list of Russians and was working through it. In connection with the assassination, the Kiev reading is now that the commander was murdered by Kremlin agents because, after Vinnytsia, he had refused to take part in further attacks.
