Igor Kirillov, a senior Russian army official, was killed in an explosion in Moscow on Tuesday.
The attack, claimed by kyiv, was filmed and broadcast on social networks.
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War in Ukraine: a thousand days since the Russian invasion
An attack in the heart of Moscow. This is what kyiv claimed this Tuesday after the explosion which killed Igor Kirillov and his assistant. An unprecedented act: the Ukrainian services have never managed, since the start of the war in 2022, to reach such a person in charge of the Russian army.
It was in the south-east of the capital, on Ryazanksi Avenue, that the Ukrainian security services (SBU) neutralized the senior officer. More precisely outside a residential building, from which the two men emerged. It was at that moment that an explosive taped to an electric scooter, according to the Tass agency, was triggered. This is also what the images of the attack show: the latter was filmed and relayed on Kyiv Post, as shown in the video at the top of this article.
“A rudimentary operation”
“It’s a daring operation, but quite rudimentary, a bit old-fashioned“, judged on LCI Vincent Crouzet. According to this former DGSE agent, around 300g of TNT would have been used, “with an electrical impulse firing device, perhaps with a cell phone. It is not easy to set up, but means that teams have come in advance to identify the locations and take note of the target’s schedules.”. According to an AFP journalist on site, the windows of several apartments were broken by the explosion, and a cordon of police was deployed in the surrounding area. The entrance to the building was heavily damaged.
If the Kremlin has not yet reacted, the SBU immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. kyiv also had this general in its sights: he had been accused on Monday of “war crimes” for ordering the use of chemical weapons against Ukrainian troops.
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The unit headed by General Kirillov, 54, does not deal with the nuclear arsenal held by Russia. The man was, however, a protagonist in the war that had been going on for two years: he was the one who “spoke, during his briefings, about American biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine“, of which Moscow accuses Washington, recalls the newspaper Kommersant on his site.
In office since April 2017, Igor Kirillov was sanctioned in October by London for the alleged deployment of chemical weapons in Ukraine. A real scourge on the battlefield: since February 2022, more than 4,800 cases of use of “chemical munitions“by the Russian army were identified, the SBU assured. According to the latter, “more than 2000 soldiers“Ukrainians had to be hospitalized with varying degrees of chemical poisoning over the same period. Russian authorities have repeatedly rejected these accusations, calling them “absurd“.
The British government also accused him of being a “leading Kremlin disinformation mouthpiece, spreading lies to cover up Russia’s shameful and dangerous behavior“.
