The Russian authorities said on Wednesday that they had detained a suspect in the killing of a senior military officer, Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, a major development in the most prominent political assassination case in the country since the start of the war in Ukraine.
The suspect, a 29-year-old citizen of Uzbekistan whose name was not released, was detained in a village outside Moscow, a spokeswoman for Russia’s prosecutor’s office said.
The spokeswoman said the detainee had confessed that Ukrainian intelligence agencies recruited him to kill General Kirillov, 54, who was in charge of the Russian military’s nuclear and chemical weapons protection forces.
An official with Ukraine’s security service, known as the S.B.U., said on Tuesday that Ukraine had been responsible for the killing, which took place in central Moscow on Tuesday. He discussed sensitive intelligence on condition of anonymity.
The detainee traveled to Moscow and placed a bomb under a scooter near the general’s home, the prosecutor’s office spokeswoman said.
He also installed a camera inside a parked rental car that transmitted the general’s movements to intelligence agents in Ukraine, she added. He was promised $100,000 and safe passage to Europe for carrying out the plot, she said.
An aide to the general was also killed when the bomb was detonated.
General Kirillov was the most senior Russian official to have been assassinated away from the battlefield since the start of the war. Previous assassination attempts have targeted Russian propagandists and more junior military officers.
On Wednesday, Russia’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said the country would raise the killing of General Kirillov at the scheduled meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Friday.
“We are certain that all the organizers and executors of the murder of Igor Kirillov will be found and punished, whoever they are and wherever they may be,” Ms. Zakharova said.
The general’s killing is the latest embarrassment for Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, the F.S.B., which has assumed greater power and influence since the start of the war in Ukraine nearly three years ago.
The F.S.B. has blamed Ukraine for most terror attacks and major accidents in the country since the invasion, usually without providing evidence.
Critics have said such tactics have allowed Russia’s intelligence agencies to deflect the blame for their own failures to detect domestic threats, often associated with Islamist groups.
Analysts have said that the F.S.B. has been blindsided by several attacks associated with Islamism, including the deadliest terror attack in Russia in more than a decade, because they were excessively focused on combating Ukrainian sabotage and terrorism operations.
The admission from a Ukrainian intelligence official that Kyiv orchestrated the killing of General Kirillov suggests that the F.S.B. has now failed to protect the country’s leadership from precisely such a threat.
After the killing, some Russian ultranationalist commentators accused the country’s secret services of ineptitude.
“The enemy’s secret services are acting with impunity on the territory of the Russian Federation, and above all in the capital and the metropolises,” Yuri Kotenok, a prominent Russian war correspondent, wrote on social media on Tuesday. “This is mayhem.”
The suspect’s citizenship of Uzbekistan could be consequential. A combination of nationalist war fervor and the participation of citizens of Central Asian countries in recent terrorist attacks have led to a rise in xenophobia and a tightening of immigration laws in Russia.
The backlash against Central Asian immigrants, by far the largest group of foreign workers in Russia, has come at a time of record labor shortages.
Russia’s business groups have been concerned that new measures against migrants would tighten the labor market further, with destabilizing effects for the economy.
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