On January 19, an employee of Roskomnadzor was killed near the agency’s central office by the Kitay-Gorod metro station in Moscow. According to sources, a 16-year-old schoolboy approached the entrance checkpoint and stabbed a man who was leaving the building. The official died at the scene, and the teenager was arrested, but no state body publicly reported the incident.
The first account came in a message received by Novaya Gazeta Europe on January 21 from an anonymous Proton address. Later, on January 29, the Telegram channel VChK-OGPU published a similar report, claiming that FSB officers arrived after the attack and classified the information. The channel said it had traced the story to a post by the teenager’s mother, who was seeking a lawyer for him; the post was later deleted.
According to VChK-OGPU, the attack took place at about 6:00 p.m. The teenager did not shout or speak and delivered a single blow “straight to the heart.” The channel also identified the victim as Alexander Belyaev, an employee of Roskomnadzor’s central office. His current position is not listed on the agency’s website; in a 2016 Roskomnadzor publication he was described as a chief specialist-expert in the communications oversight division. The outlet Agentstvo reported that Belyaev received a commendation from Vladimir Putin in 2017.
Neither Roskomnadzor nor law enforcement agencies have issued statements. No case information has appeared on court websites either. Lawyer Dmitry Zakhvatov noted that proceedings involving defendants under 16 are held behind closed doors, but if the accused is older, the case would normally be expected to appear in court databases. Sergey Davidis, head of the project Support for Political Prisoners. Memorial, said the law requires publication of information about court activity, although the rules and personal-data exceptions leave room for differing interpretations.
According to Meduza’s sources, state and pro-government media were advised as early as January 19 not to publish information about the killing of the Roskomnadzor employee. One Russian editor told Novaya Gazeta Europe that VChK-OGPU, listed by the authorities as a “foreign agent,” remained the main source, and many outlets are unwilling to cite such sources.
Agentstvo reported that the teenager, identified as Artyom, came from a low-income family in the Moskvorechye-Saburovo district. Two YouTube channels with his videos were found online; in them he mostly discussed anime, teenage influencers, snacks, skipping school and homemade firecrackers, with almost no political content. Blogger Ivan Astashin named him as Artyom Ilyich Andreev and published details for sending letters to his pretrial detention center. Anti-fascist sources urged skepticism toward a neo-Nazi group’s claim of responsibility, noting that it had previously spread false information about another killing.