Kyiv, Ukraine – Igor Kirillov, the 54-year-old general who led Russia’s nuclear defense force, was assassinated just a day after Ukrainian intelligence accused him of ordering the use of banned chemical weapons against Ukrainian soldiers.
Explosives hidden in a scooter parked outside a Moscow apartment building blew up Kirillov and his assistant on Tuesday.
Before his death, Kirillov had frequently claimed on Russian talk shows, without providing evidence, that Kiev was “planning to build a dirty bomb” and that the United States was running “biological warfare laboratories” in Ukraine to “breed” mosquitoes that contain anthrax and transmitting cholera.
The explosion occurred in a densely populated and busy district in southeast Moscow.
It was the fourth attack on senior Russian military officials in less than two months. Ukraine does not always claim responsibility for such attacks, but its officials often praise them on social media.
In this case, a Ukrainian official, speaking to Al Jazeera and several other media outlets on condition of anonymity, claimed responsibility for the bombing that killed Kirillov and his aide.
Kiev has been waging a decade-long campaign to crush Russian military personnel and officials, as well as some of their vocal supporters, as well as Ukrainian separatists and apostates in Moscow-held territories.
The explosion shattered the apartment building’s doors and windows and shook snow from cars parked nearby. According to Kirillov’s ex-neighbor, it was like a “breath of death.”
Ulyana, who used to walk her dog near the general’s house, said the attack made her “really think about what your neighbors do for a living.”
“You can feel the war knocking on the door. “You feel the breath of death, even if it is the death of someone who deserves it,” the 34-year-old, who took part in anti-Kremlin rallies last year before leaving Russia, told Al Jazeera.
She accidentally repeated the words of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).
“He was a legitimate target and deserved to die,” an SBU source told Al Jazeera. “And there are many more Russian war criminals on our list.”
Ukraine’s campaign of annihilation “does not contradict international law, it is about attacks on enemy territory targeting enemy combatants,” Kiev-based analyst Igar Tyshkevich told Al Jazeera.
The latest victims include missile and drone designer Mikhail Shatsky, who was shot dead in a Moscow park on December 12.
On December 9, a car bomb killed separatist “prison officer” Sergei Yevsyukov in the rebel-held city of Donetsk. In July 2022, an explosion in the Olenivka prison he ran killed 53 Ukrainian prisoners of war and injured more than 100.
In mid-November, Captain Valery Trankovsky, who was commanding rocket launches from annexed Crimea, bled to death after his car was blown up in the city of Sevastopol. One of the launches killed 29 civilians in central Ukraine in July 2022.
The elimination campaign continues to evolve, reaching further into Russia and targeting senior figures in the Kremlin’s war effort.
“What impresses me is the level of its systemic development,” Lt. Gen. Ihor Romanenko, former deputy chief of general staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, told Al Jazeera.
He said the campaign would continue even if Kiev and Moscow negotiate a ceasefire or peace deal.
“The retaliatory measures will affect the war criminals, regardless of the validity period and their location,” Romanenko said. “They should feel bad, and their families should see their husband tormented by guilt until his (death) sentence is carried out.”
The campaign’s first victims were Ukrainian separatist leaders and strongmen in the southeastern region of Donbass.
Ukrainian agents mostly blew them up – in elevators, restaurants and cars – prompting a joke about Kiev’s “elevator workers.”
More casualties occurred after Russia’s large-scale invasion in 2022 alleged collaborators were shot, blown up and poisoned in occupied territories.
Ukrainian intelligence services have also tracked down people who pass on important information to Russia, such as the coordinates of military units, energy infrastructure or air defense facilities.
They have a legion of civilian volunteers who scour social networks and leaked databases, using open source intelligence (OSINT) tools to identify Russian military leaders accused of war crimes – and insist they should be killed.
“Yes, I call for systematic violence against the murderers,” Maksym Bakhmatov, a businessman and occasional stand-up comedian, told Al Jazeera in November 2022.
He led efforts to release detailed personal information about 1,400 Russian military personnel accused of torturing, raping and killing civilians in the Kiev suburb of Bucha in early 2022.
A range of evidence from Ukrainian officials and global human rights groups links Russian forces to the atrocities in Bucha, whose name has become synonymous shocking mass killings of civilians. Russia rejects the claims.
The campaign “shifted” to Russia just months after the full-scale invasion, but began with a blunder.
In August 2022, a bomb ripped through the car of Aleksandr Dugin, a far-right Russian “philosopher” who had said that Ukrainians should be “killed, killed, killed.”
Instead, Dugin’s daughter Darya, who also actively supported the war, was murdered in the explosion.
Then, in May 2023, another car bomb injured Zakhar Prilepin, a separatist commander and writer who admitted to committing war crimes in Donbas.
In December 2023, Ilya Kiva, a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian lawmaker who had fled to Russia, was shot dead in a forest outside Moscow under a contract immediately after recording a video sharply criticizing Kiev.
“Highest possible performance”
So far, Kirillov is the highest-ranking Russian targeted by Ukrainian intelligence.
Killing a commander of this caliber is the “highest possible achievement,” says Nikolai Mitrokhin, a researcher at the University of Bremen.
“This is the act that every intelligence officer can be proud of until the end of their days,” he told Al Jazeera.
He said that Moscow’s top politicians never applied the “elevator workers” joke to themselves.
“And that’s what they should have done,” he said, despite the limited ability of Ukrainian intelligence to deliver explosives and find agents to carry out the attacks.
Moscow claims that an Uzbek citizen planted the bomb near Kirillov’s home in exchange for $100,000 and relocation to Europe.
Kirillov was killed shortly after attending a defense conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Kirillov’s death “shows once again that no matter how successful we are on the battlefield, how euphoric we are, how we talk about the upper hand, the other side always has a chance to stab us painfully,” said pro-Kremlin journalist and official Andrey Medvedev wrote on Telegram.
He said the assassination would distract everyday Ukrainians from the bad news from the front and the rumors about it Lowering the conscription age from 25 to 18.
However, some Ukrainians do not feel distracted.
“We’re in deep shit. We are losing the war, we wasted eight years,” Diana Hordienko, a nurse in Kiev, told Al Jazeera between the 2014 separatist uprising and the Russian invasion.
“The Russians will retaliate and more innocent people will die,” she said.
On Friday morning, Russian bombers were launched A rocket attack on Kiev, killing one and wounding seven.
