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A top Russian general accused of using chemical weapons in the invasion of Ukraine has died after a bomb exploded at the entrance to his home in Moscow early Tuesday, killing him and his assistant, investigators said.
Russia’s Investigative Committee, a major crimes department, said Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the head of the military’s nuclear, chemical and biological defense forces, died in an explosion caused by a bomb planted on a motor scooter.
Kirillov is the most prominent military officer to be assassinated in Russia since his assassination attempt began Large-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
A day earlier, the Ukrainian security service SBU had issued a “suspicion report” – essentially an arrest warrant – against Kirillov for alleged “war crimes” against the Kiev forces.
A Ukrainian intelligence official with direct knowledge of the attack told the Financial Times that the SBU was behind the murder.
“Kirilov was a war criminal and a completely legitimate target because he gave the order to use banned chemical weapons against the Ukrainian military,” an official said. “Such an inglorious end awaits everyone who kills Ukrainians. Retribution for war crimes is inevitable.”
The official said the scooter containing the explosives was detonated when Kirillov and his assistant, identified in Russian media as Ilya P., were near the entrance to a house on Ryazansky Prospect in Moscow, where the driver had come, to put the general to work.
According to Russian media, the explosion shook the walls of several nearby buildings and sent shrapnel dozens of meters away, damaging several windows.
Kirillov was hit with British sanctions in October “over the use of barbaric chemical weapons in Ukraine,” including the toxic asphyxiant chloropicrin.
The UK said Kirillov was also “a major mouthpiece for Kremlin disinformation”, citing public briefings in which he regularly accused Kiev of planning to use chemical weapons and develop a nuclear “dirty bomb”.
Last year, Kirillov even claimed that Ukraine had plans to launch special U.S.-developed drones carrying “infected mosquitoes” that would spread malaria among Russian forces. Kirillov also cited Russia’s efforts to discredit reports that Moscow’s ally, recently ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad, used chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on Telegram that Kirillov “spent many years exposing the crimes of the Anglo-Saxons” in his briefings. “He worked fearlessly. He didn’t hide behind anyone’s back. He hit everything head on,” she wrote.
Mash and 112, two news outlets on the social media app Telegram with ties to Russian law enforcement, published a photo of two bodies in the snow outside an apartment building on Moscow’s Ryazansky Prospekt, surrounded by shards of glass from broken windows.
The bomb on the scooter contained between 100 and 300 grams of TNT, Russian news agencies reported, citing investigative sources.
The SBU’s statement on Monday said that Kirillov was “responsible for the mass use of banned chemical weapons by the Russians against the defense forces on the eastern and southern fronts of Ukraine.”
It blamed him for “more than 4,800 cases of enemy use of chemical munitions since the beginning of the all-out war.”
Ukrainian soldiers have told the Financial Times There were cases when they were attacked with chemical weapons during battles with the Russians.
The US State Department said Russia used the chemical agent chloropicrin against Ukrainian forces in violation of the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention.
Tuesday’s bombing was a sign of work by Ukrainian intelligence services in Russia, where they have built a network of secret agents to carry out targeted killings of key military personnel and acts of sabotage against their enemies’ war machine to disrupt the ongoing invasion of Moscow.
The Ukrainian secret services rarely explicitly publicly claim responsibility for the attacks.
On December 9, a car bomb killed the former head of a prison in the Russian-occupied Donetsk region, where dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war were killed in an explosion that Kiev authorities said was deliberately set off by Moscow’s forces. Although Ukraine’s intelligence services were suspected, no one claimed responsibility for this attack.
However, in some cases, such as the murder of Colonel Dmitry Golenkov, a senior officer in Russia’s 52nd Heavy Bomber Regiment, Ukraine has publicly accepted responsibility.
Ukrainian military intelligence, known as GUR, released images of Golenkov’s body in the Bryansk region in October after claiming his associates had beaten him to death with a hammer. The GUR said the air force commander ordered the deadly rocket attack on a shopping center in Ukraine in June 2022 that killed 22 civilians.
A GUR spokesman declined to comment on Kirillov’s killing on Tuesday.
