The head of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Defense Forces, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, was killed on Dec. 17 by a bomb planted near an apartment block in Moscow.
Russia’s Investigative Committee said that Kirillov’s assistant also died when an explosive device, hidden in a scooter parked near the apartment block, detonated.
The committee’s spokesperson Svetlana Petrenko said in a statement, “Investigators, forensic experts, and operational services are working at the scene. Investigative and search activities are being carried out to establish all the circumstances around this crime.”
Russia’s state-owned TASS news agency said the bomb exploded in Moscow’s Ryazansky Prospekt, a road that is four miles from the Kremlin.
On Dec. 16, Kirillov, 54, was sentenced in absentia by a Ukrainian court over Russia’s alleged use of banned chemical weapons during the conflict with Ukraine, which began in Feb. 2022.
Ukraine’s Security Service, the SBU, said they had recorded more than 4,800 uses of chemical weapons on the battlefield since 2022.
Most of those uses involved K-51 combat grenades.
Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev, who is deputy head of the country’s security council, said the attack was an attempt by Ukraine to distract attention away from its failures on the battlefield, and he promised Kyiv’s “senior military-political leadership will face inevitable retribution.”
The statement went on to accuse the Russians of using toxic chemicals against Ukrainian troops.
“We have recorded 346 individual toxic chemical incidents in 2024 so far – equivalent to 6 Russian breaches of the CWC per day. The use of chemical weapons is seen by the enemy as a means of gaining tactical advantages and demoralising the Ukrainian Defense Forces.”
In May, the U.S. State Department said it had recorded the use of chloropicrin—a chemical weapon that was invented during World War I—against Ukrainian troops.
TASS, on its Telegram channel, referred to the SBU filing charges against Kirilov, with Ukraine alleging he “was responsible for the widespread use of prohibited chemical weapons in Ukraine.”
TASS also reported that security officers were reviewing CCTV footage from nearby residential buildings, while the area had been cordoned off and senior officials from the Russian Interior Ministry had arrived at the scene.
Kirillov, who was named the head of Russia’s nuclear defense forces in April 2017, had been sanctioned by Britain and Canada for his role in the Ukraine conflict.
Since first invading Ukraine in Feb. 2022, Russia has seized large parts of the Donbas region and southern Ukraine, on top of Crimea, which it annexed in 2014.
Earlier this month, Sergei Yevsyukov, 49, the head of the Russian-operated Olenivka Prison, was killed in the Russian-held city of Donetsk, Ukraine, when a bomb exploded under his car.
In July 2022, dozens of prisoners of war were killed by a missile strike on Olenivka Prison that Russia blamed on Ukraine. The Ukrainians said Russia targeted the prison to destroy evidence of war crimes that had been committed there.
In Dec. 2023 Illya Kyva, a former pro-Russian Ukrainian MP in Ukraine, was assassinated near Moscow.
