Explosion kills head of Russian nuclear defense force in Moscow: NPR

Maj. Gen. Igor Kirillov, chief of the Russian military’s Radiation, Chemical and Bioprotection Unit, attends a news conference at Kubinka Patriot Park outside Moscow, Russia, June 22, 2018.

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MOSCOW – A top Russian general was killed Tuesday by a bomb hidden in a scooter outside his Moscow home, a day after Ukraine’s security service filed criminal charges against him. A Ukrainian official said the country’s security service carried out the attack.

Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, the head of the military’s nuclear, biological and chemical defense forces, was killed on the way to his office. According to Russian news reports, Kirillov’s assistant also died in the bombing, which was triggered remotely. Images from the crime scene showed broken windows and burnt and blackened masonry.

Kirillov has been sanctioned by several countries, including the United Kingdom and Canada, over his actions in the Moscow War in Ukraine. On Monday, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) opened a criminal investigation against him, accusing him of directing the use of banned chemical weapons.

An SBU official said the agency was behind the attack. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information, described Kirillov as a “war criminal and a completely legitimate target.”

The SBU said it had registered more than 4,800 cases of Russia using chemical weapons on the battlefield since its full-scale invasion in February 2022. In May, the US State Department said in a statement that it had recorded the use of chloropicrin, a poison gas first used against Ukrainian troops during World War I.

Russia denied any use of chemical weapons in Ukraine and in return accused Kiev of using toxic agents in combat.

Kirillov, who took up his current job in 2017, was one of the most prominent representatives of these allegations. He held numerous briefings in which he accused the Ukrainian military of using toxic agents and planning attacks with radioactive substances – claims that Ukraine and its Western allies dismissed as propaganda.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, several prominent figures have been killed in targeted attacks.

Darya Dugina, a commentator on Russian television channels and daughter of the pro-Kremlin nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin, died in a car bomb attack in 2022 that investigators say was aimed at her father.

Vladlen Tatarsky, a popular military blogger, died in April 2023 when a statuette given to him at a party in St. Petersburg exploded. A Russian woman who said she presented the figure on behalf of a contact in Ukraine was sentenced to 27 years in prison in the case.

In December 2023, Illia Kiva, a former pro-Moscow Ukrainian parliamentarian who fled to Russia, was shot dead near Moscow. Ukrainian military intelligence praised the killing and warned that other “traitors to Ukraine” would share the same fate.

On December 9, an explosive device was planted under a car in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Donetsk, allegedly targeting Sergei Yevsyukov, the former head of Olenivka prison, where dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war died in a rocket attack in July 2022. Another was reported at injured in the explosion. Russian authorities said they had arrested a suspect in the attack.