PAYBACK: Top Russian Cruise Missile Engineer Gunned Down Near Moscow.

Mikhail Shatsky was found dead in the Kuzminki forest park in the suburb of Kotelniki southeast of Moscow this week.

Shatsky was deputy chief of design and head of software at the Moscow Experimental Design Bureau Mars, which develops automatic control and navigation systems for satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles. Mars is part of Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom.

Exiled opposition journalist Alexander Nevzorov, who first broke the news of the assassination, said Shatsky also oversaw upgrades of Kh-59 missiles into the low-flying subsonic Kh-69 versions.

The upgrades must be going well enough or Putin might have had him thrown out a window.