Top Russian general killed in bomb blast in Moscow

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A top Russian general accused of using chemical weapons in the invasion of Ukraine has died after a bomb went off at the entrance to his home in Moscow early on Tuesday, investigators said, killing him and his assistant.

Russia’s Investigative Committee, a major crimes unit, said Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, the head of the military’s nuclear, chemical and biological defence forces, had died in an explosion caused by a bomb placed on a scooter.

Kirillov is the most prominent military officer to be assassinated since Russia began its full-scale of invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Ukraine’s SBU security service had a day earlier put out a “notice of suspicion” — essentially a warrant — for Kirillov over alleged “war crimes committed” against Kyiv’s forces.

A Ukrainian intelligence official with direct knowledge of the attack told the Financial Times that the SBU was behind the killing.

“Kirilov was a war criminal and a completely legitimate target, as he gave orders to use banned chemical weapons against the Ukrainian military,” a the official said. “Such an inglorious end awaits all 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 of a house on Ryazansky Prospekt in Moscow where the driver had come to take the general to work.

The explosion shook the walls of several nearby buildings and sent shrapnel flying for dozens of meters, according to Russian media, damaging several windows.

Kirillov was hit with UK sanctions in October “for the deployment of barbaric chemical weapons in Ukraine”, including the toxic choking agent chloropicrin.

The UK said Kirillov was also “a significant mouthpiece for Kremlin disinformation”, a reference 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 Ukraine had plans to launch special US-designed drones carrying “infected mosquitoes” that would spread malaria among Russia’s forces. Kirillov also led Russian efforts to discredit reports showing that Moscow’s ally, the recently ousted dictator Bashar al-Assad, used chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war.

Maria Zakharova, Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, wrote on Telegram that Kirillov had 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 met everything head-on,” she wrote.

Mash and 112, two news outlets on 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 grammes of TNT, according to Russian news outlets, citing sources in the investigation.

The SBU’s statement on Monday said Kirillov was “responsible for the mass use of banned chemical weapons by the Russians against the Defence Forces on the eastern and southern fronts of Ukraine”.

It blamed him for “more than 4,800 cases of the enemy’s use of chemical munitions [that] have been recorded since the beginning of the full-scale war”.

Ukrainian soldiers have recounted to the Financial Times instances in which they have been assaulted by 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 bore hallmarks of the work of Ukraine’s spy agencies inside Russia, where they have cultivated a network of covert operatives to carry out targeted killings of key military personnel and acts of sabotage against their enemies’ war machine to disrupt Moscow’s ongoing invasion.

Ukraine’s intelligence agencies rarely claim explicit public credit for the assassinations.

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 had died in an explosion that Kyiv authorities said was intentionally triggered by Moscow’s forces. While Ukraine’s intelligence agencies were suspected, nobody claimed responsibility for that attack.

In a few cases, however, such as the assassination of Col Dmitry Golenkov, a senior officer in Russia’s 52nd heavy bomber regiment, Ukraine does publicly claim responsibility.

The Ukrainian military intelligence directorate known as the GUR published images of Golenkov’s body in the Bryansk region in October, after it said its operatives had bludgeoned him with a hammer. The GUR said the air force commander had ordered the lethal missile strike on a shopping centre in Ukraine in June 2022 that killed 22 civilians.

A spokesman for GUR declined to comment on the killing of Kirillov on Tuesday.