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A top Russian general accused of using chemical weapons in the invasion of Ukraine died after a bomb exploded in the driveway of his Moscow home early Tuesday, investigators said, killing him and his assistant.
Russia’s Investigative Committee, a major crimes unit, said Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, head of the military’s nuclear, chemical and biological defense forces, had died in an explosion caused by a bomb placed on a scooter.
Kirillov is the most prominent military officer killed since Russia began its large scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Ukraine’s SBU security service had a day earlier issued a “notice of suspicion” – essentially a court order – against Kirillov for alleged “war crimes committed” against kyiv forces.
A Ukrainian intelligence official with direct knowledge of the attack told the Financial Times that the SBU was behind the assassination.
“Kirilov was a war criminal and a completely legitimate target, as he gave orders to use banned chemical weapons against the Ukrainian military,” the official said. “Such a shameful end awaits all those who kill Ukrainians. “Retribution for war crimes is inevitable.”
The official said the scooter carrying the explosives had been detonated when Kirillov and his assistant, identified in Russian media as Ilya P, were near the entrance to a house on Ryazansky Prospekt in Moscow, where the driver had gone to take the general to work.
The explosion shook the walls of several nearby buildings and sent shrapnel flying dozens of meters, according to Russian media, damaging several windows.
Kirillov received sanctions from the United Kingdom in October “for the deployment of barbaric chemical weapons in Ukraine,” including the toxic asphyxiant agent chloropicrin.
The United Kingdom said Kirillov was also “a major spokesperson for Kremlin disinformation,” referring to public briefings in which he regularly accused kyiv of plotting to use chemical weapons and develop a nuclear “dirty bomb.”
Last year, Kirillov even claimed that Ukraine had plans to launch special US-designed drones that would carry “infected mosquitoes” that would spread malaria among Russian forces. Kirillov also led Russian efforts to debunk reports showing that Moscow’s ally, recently ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad, used chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war.
Maria Zakharova, a spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry, wrote on Telegram that Kirillov had spent “many years exposing the crimes of the Anglo-Saxons” in his briefings. “He worked without fear. He didn’t hide behind anyone’s back. “He faced everything head on,” he wrote.
Mash and 112, two media outlets on the social media app Telegram with ties to Russian law enforcement, posted a photo of two bodies in the snow outside an apartment building on Moscow’s Ryazansky Prospekt, surrounded by shards of glass. of broken windows.
The bomb on the scooter contained between 100 and 300 grams of TNT, according to Russian media, citing sources in the investigation.
The SBU statement on Monday said Kirillov was “responsible for the massive use of banned chemical weapons by the Russians against the Defense Forces on the eastern and southern fronts of Ukraine.”
He blamed it for “more than 4,800 cases of enemy use of chemical munitions (that) have been recorded since the beginning of the large-scale war.”
Ukrainian soldiers have reported to the Financial Times cases in which they have been attacked with chemical weapons during battles with the Russians.
The US State Department has said Russia has used the chemical agent chloropicrin against Ukrainian forces in violation of the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention.
Tuesday’s bombing had hallmarks of the work of Ukraine’s spy agencies inside Russia, where they have cultivated a network of covert agents to carry out targeted assassinations of key military personnel and acts of sabotage against the war machine of their enemies. to disrupt the ongoing invasion of Moscow.
Ukraine’s intelligence agencies rarely explicitly take public credit for the killings.
On December 9, a car bomb killed the former director of a prison in the Russian-occupied Donetsk region, where dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war had died in an explosion that kyiv authorities said was intentionally set off by forces. from Moscow. While Ukraine’s intelligence agencies were suspected, no one claimed responsibility for that attack.
However, in a few cases, such as the assassination of Colonel Dmitry Golenkov, a senior officer in Russia’s 52nd Heavy Bomber Regiment, Ukraine publicly claims responsibility.
The Ukrainian military intelligence directorate known as GUR released images of Golenkov’s body in the Bryansk region in October, after saying its agents had beaten him with a hammer. The GUR said the air force commander had ordered the lethal missile attack on a shopping center in Ukraine in June 2022 that killed 22 civilians.
A GUR spokesman declined to comment on Kirillov’s murder on Tuesday.
