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A top Russian general 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.
An SBU official declined to comment on Tuesday.
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”.
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 Defense 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 credit for the assassinations.
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.
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