A top Russian general was killed on Tuesday when a bomb hidden in a motorcycle exploded outside his apartment building in Moscow, a day after the Ukrainian security service filed criminal charges against him. A Ukrainian official said the service carried out the attack.
Lieutenant-General Igor Kirillov, head of the army’s nuclear, biological and chemical protection forces, was killed as he left for his office. Kirillov’s assistant also died in the attack.
Kirillov, 54, was subject to sanctions from several countries, including the United Kingdom and Canada, due to his actions in Moscow’s war in Ukraine. On Monday, the Ukrainian Security Service opened a criminal investigation against him, accusing him of directing the use of banned chemical weapons.
An official in the Ukrainian Security Service said that 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.”
Ukraine’s security service said it had recorded more than 4,800 occasions in which Russia had used chemical weapons on the battlefield since its full-scale invasion in February 2022. In May, the US State Department said it had recorded the use of chloropicrin, a poison gas that was deployed for the first time. In World War I, against Ukrainian forces.
Russia denied using any chemical weapons in Ukraine, and in turn accused Kiev of using toxic materials in the fighting.
Kirillov, who assumed his current position in 2017, was one of the most prominent figures to make these accusations. He held numerous briefings to accuse the Ukrainian military of using toxic agents and planning attacks with radioactive materials — claims that Ukraine and its Western allies rejected as propaganda.
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Russian news reports said the bomb used in Tuesday’s attack was detonated remotely. Pictures from the scene showed smashed windows and burned bricks.
Investigators work near a motorcycle at the spot where Lieutenant-General Igor Kirillov, head of Russia’s nuclear, biological and chemical defense forces, and his aide Ilya Polikarpov, were killed in the explosion of an explosive device planted near an apartment building in Moscow, Russia. Tuesday, December 17, 2024.
AP photo
A State Security official presented a video clip they said was of the bombing. It shows two men leaving a building shortly before an explosion fills the frame.
Russia’s top government investigative agency said it was looking into Kirillov’s death as a terrorist case, and officials in Moscow vowed to punish Ukraine.
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russia’s Security Council headed by President Vladimir Putin, described the attack as an attempt by Kiev to divert public attention from its military failures and vowed that its “top military-political leadership will face inevitable retaliation.”
Last year, Russia was at the forefront of the war, pushing deeper into the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine despite heavy losses. Ukraine tried to change the dynamic by pushing into Russia’s Kursk region, but continued to slowly lose territory on its territory.
Since the Russian invasion, several high-profile figures have been killed in targeted attacks believed to have been carried out by Ukraine.
Daria Dugina, a Russian TV commentator and daughter of Kremlin-linked nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin, died in a 2022 car bombing that investigators suspected was aimed at her father.
Vladlen Tatarsky, a popular military blogger, died in April 2023, when a statuette presented to him exploded at a ceremony in St. Petersburg. A Russian woman who said she made the statue on the orders of an acquaintance in Ukraine has been convicted and sentenced to 27 years in prison.
In December 2023, Ilya Kiva, a former pro-Moscow Ukrainian MP who fled to Russia, was shot dead near Moscow. Ukrainian military intelligence praised the killing, warning that other “traitors of Ukraine” would face 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 the Olenivka prison where dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war were killed in a rocket attack in July 2022. Another person was injured in the explosion. Russian authorities said they arrested a suspect in the attack.
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Associated Press writer Ilya Novikov contributed from Kiev, Ukraine.
& Edition 2024 The Canadian Press
