A top Russian general was killed by a bomb hidden in a motor scooter outside his Moscow home on Tuesday, a day after Ukrainian security services filed criminal charges against him. A Ukrainian official said the service carried out the attack.
Lieutenant General Igor Kirillovthe head of the military’s nuclear, biological and chemical defense forces, was killed on the way to his office. Kirillov’s assistant also died in the attack.
Kirillov, 54, has been sanctioned by several countries, including the United Kingdom and Canada, over his actions in the Moscow War in Ukraine. On Monday, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) opened a criminal investigation against him, accusing him of directing the use of banned chemical weapons.
An SBU official said the agency was behind the attack. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information, described Kirillov as a “war criminal and a completely legitimate target.”
The SBU said it had registered more than 4,800 cases of Russia using chemical weapons on the battlefield since the full-scale invasion in February 2022. In May, the US State Department said it had registered the use of chloropicrin, a poison gas used for the first time, against Ukrainian troops in World War I.
Russia denied the use of chemical weapons in Ukraine and in return accused Kiev of using toxic agents in combat.
Kirillov, who took up his current job in 2017, was one of the most prominent representatives of these allegations. He held numerous briefings in which he accused the Ukrainian military of using toxic agents and planning attacks with radioactive substances – claims that Ukraine and its Western allies dismissed as propaganda.
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According to Russian news reports, the bomb used in Tuesday’s attack was triggered remotely. Images from the scene of the accident showed broken windows and burnt masonry.
Investigators work near a motor scooter at the site where Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defense Forces, and his assistant Ilya Polikarpov were killed by an explosive device set off near an apartment building in Moscow, Russia, was attached. Tuesday, December 17, 2024.
AP photo
The SBU official provided a video that purportedly showed the bombing. It shows two men leaving a building just before an explosion fills the frame.
Russia’s top state investigative agency said it viewed Kirillov’s death as a case of terrorism, and officials in Moscow vowed to punish Ukraine.
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council chaired by President Vladimir Putin, called the attack an attempt by Kiev to divert public attention from its military failings and vowed that “its senior military-political leadership will face inevitable retaliation.”
Last year, Russia was at the forefront of the war, pushing deeper into the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine despite heavy losses. Ukraine tried to change the dynamic with an invasion of Russia’s Kursk region, but continued to slowly lose ground on its own territory.
Since Russia’s invasion, several prominent figures have been killed in targeted attacks suspected to have been carried out by Ukraine.
Darya Dugina, a commentator on Russian television channels and daughter of the Kremlin-aligned nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin, died in a car bomb attack in 2022 that investigators say was aimed at her father.
Vladlen Tatarsky, a popular military blogger, died in April 2023 when a statuette given to him at a party in St. Petersburg exploded. A Russian woman who said she presented the figure on the orders of a contact in Ukraine was convicted and sentenced to 27 years in prison.
In December 2023, Illia Kiva, a former pro-Moscow Ukrainian parliamentarian who fled to Russia, was shot dead near Moscow. Ukrainian military intelligence praised the killing and warned that other “traitors to Ukraine” would share the same fate.
On December 9, a bomb planted under a car in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Donetsk killed Sergei Yevsyukov, the former head of Olenivka prison, where dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war died in a rocket attack in July 2022. Another person was injured in the explosion. Russian authorities said they had arrested a suspect in the attack.
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Associated Press writer Illia Novikov wrote from Kyiv, Ukraine.
&Copy 2024 The Canadian Press
