A general in charge of the Russian military’s nuclear and chemical weapons protection forces was killed by a bomb on a Moscow street on Tuesday, the Russian authorities said, in one of the most brazen assassinations since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago.
The general, Igor Kirillov, died along with an aide after an explosive device planted in a scooter was detonated on Tuesday morning near the entryway to a residential building, Russia’s Investigative Committee, a law enforcement agency, said in a statement.
A day before his killing, Ukraine’s security service had charged General Kirillov in absentia, saying he was responsible for the “massive use of banned chemical weapons” in Ukraine.
The division he oversaw carries out specialized tasks, including protecting Russian troops when chemical and nuclear weapons are used.
The RIA Novosti state news agency published a photograph of what it said was a bomb-disposal robot operating outside a brick building in Moscow. The agency reported that the explosion occurred at about 6:12 a.m. and was so powerful that it damaged windows as far up as the third floor and shattered them in a building across the street.
General Kirillov was the head of Russia’s radioactive, chemical and biological defense forces. He helped develop a thermobaric rocket launcher, the TOS-2, according to a biography published by RIA Novosti. The Russian military frequently reports its use in Ukraine.
Dmitri Medvedev, a former president and deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, on Tuesday blamed Kyiv for the killing, pledging “inevitable retaliation” against “military and political leadership of Ukraine.”
By assassinating General Kirillov, the Ukrainian government is trying to “drag out the war and killing” in Ukraine, Mr. Medvedev said in a statement issued by the security council, according to Tass.
The killing of General Kirillov was the highest-profile apparent assassination of a Russian military official far from the battlefield since the start of the invasion in 2022. While other Russian generals have died in occupied Ukraine or near the front line, he is the highest-ranking military official to have been killed inside Russia.
Several previous targeted killings in Russia have been tied to Ukraine, including a car-bomb attack near Moscow that killed the daughter of a prominent nationalist in October 2022.
Outnumbered on the battlefield, where it is steadily losing ground under relentless Russian assaults, Ukraine has regularly engaged in unconventional warfare that include acts of sabotage and suspected assassinations of Russian officials, like local administrators in the occupied territories of Ukraine.
The S.B.U., Ukraine’s security service, said that Russian forces had used chemical weapons on the battlefield more than 4,800 times since the war began, on General Kirillov’s orders.
It also said that Russian forces on the battlefield had used combat grenades equipped with the irritant chemical agents CS and CN. These tear gases, most commonly used by riot police officers to control crowds, are banned in warfare under the Chemical Weapons Convention, an arms control treaty ratified by more than 150 countries, including Russia.
The U.S. State Department said this spring that Russia had used chloropicrin, a choking agent widely used in World War I, as well as tear gas on the battlefield. Britain also imposed sanctions on General Kirillov this fall for his responsibility in deploying chemical weapons in Ukraine.
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