Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
A senior Russian general was killed by a bomb hidden in a scooter outside his Moscow apartment building on Tuesday, a day after Ukraine’s security service filed criminal charges against him. A Ukrainian official said the service carried out the attack.
Lt. gen. Igor Kirillovthe chief of the army’s nuclear, biological and chemical protection forces, was killed on his way to his office. Kirillov’s assistant also died in the attack.
Kirillov, 54, was under sanctions from several countries, including the United Kingdom and Canada, for his actions during Moscow’s war in Ukraine. On Monday, Ukraine’s Security Service, or SBU, opened a criminal investigation against him, accusing him of directing the use of banned chemical weapons.
An official at the SBU said the agency was behind the attack. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information, described Kirillov as a “war criminal and a completely legitimate target.”
The SBU has said it recorded more than 4,800 occasions when Russia used chemical weapons on the battlefield since its full invasion in February 2022. In May, the US State Department said it had recorded the use of chloropicrin, a poison gas that first deployed was in the First World War, against Ukrainian troops.
Russia has denied using chemical weapons in Ukraine and has in turn accused Kiev of using toxic agents in the conflict.
Kirillov, who took up his current job in 2017, was one of the most high-profile figures to level these allegations. He held numerous briefings to accuse the Ukrainian military of using toxic agents and planning attacks with radioactive substances — claims that Ukraine and its Western allies dismissed as propaganda.
Get daily National news
Get the day’s top news, political, economic and current affairs headlines, delivered to your inbox once a day.
The bomb used in Tuesday’s attack was remotely triggered, according to Russian news reports. Images from the scene showed broken windows and burnt brickwork.
Investigators work near a scooter at the site where Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Defense Forces and his assistant Ilya Polikarpov were killed by an explosive device planted near a residential apartment block in Moscow, Russia , Tuesday 17 December 2024.
Photo AP
The SBU official provided video they said of the bombing. It shows two men leaving a building shortly before an explosion fills the frame.
Russia’s top investigative agency said it views Kirillov’s death as a case of terrorism, and officials in Moscow vowed to punish Ukraine.
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of the Russian Security Council chaired by President Vladimir Putin, described the attack as an attempt by Kiev to divert public attention from its military failures and vowed that its “senior military-political leadership will face inevitable retaliation .”
In the past year, Russia has been on the front foot in the war, grinding deeper in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine despite heavy losses. Ukraine tried to change the dynamic with an incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, but it has been steadily losing ground on its own territory.
Since Russia invaded, several prominent figures have been killed in targeted attacks believed to be carried out by Ukraine.
Darya Dugina, a commentator on Russian TV channels and the daughter of Kremlin-linked nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin, died in a 2022 car bombing that investigators suspect was aimed at her father.
Vladlen Tatarsky, a popular military blogger, died in April 2023 when a statue given to him at a party in St. Petersburg exploded. A Russian woman, who said she presented the image at the behest of a contact in Ukraine, was convicted and sentenced to 27 years in prison.
In December 2023, Illia Kiva, a former pro-Moscow Ukrainian lawmaker who fled to Russia, was shot and killed near Moscow. Ukrainian military intelligence praised the killing, warning that other “traitors of Ukraine” would share the same fate.
On December 9, a bomb 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 died in a missile strike in July 2022. One other person was injured in the explosion. Russian authorities said they arrested a suspect in the attack.
–
Associated Press writer Illia Novikov contributed from Kiev, Ukraine.
& copy 2024 The Canadian Press
