It was a gruesome morning scene. Two bodies lay sprawled in front of a shattered apartment block. Blood was visible on a thin coating of white snow. Wreckage was strewn over the pavement: broken glass, bricks, door frames, and an e-scooter tossed into a corner by a mighty explosion.
Two men had been leaving a residential building when the blast happened. It was 6.12am. One was Lt Gen Igor Kirillov, the head of the Russian army’s chemical weapons division. Kirillov was a key player in Moscow’s ruthless war against Ukraine. The other was Kirillov’s assistant. Video shows their last moments as they walked into the street. Both appear to have died instantly.
The assassination took place in a suburban part of south-east Moscow, on Ryazansky Avenue. The district is home to high-rise buildings, shopping malls and an attractive neighbourhood park, Kuskovo, with an 18th-century wooden palace and ornamental lake. The frontline in Ukraine is 650 miles or a gruelling 15-hour-drive away from the capital.
Seemingly, this epic distance had not deterred Ukraine’s SBU security service from carrying out Kirillov’s killing. Sources in Kyiv confirmed that the agency was responsible. The general’s death was the SBU’s most audacious operation to date – a strike designed to instil panic and fear among senior Kremlin and army figures.
Speculation swirled as to how Ukraine had managed to carry out the bombing. Twenty-four hours earlier, the SBU had charged Kirillov with war crimes, publishing his photo with the word “Suspect” stamped in red. The general had ordered the mass battlefield use of banned chemical weapons, the SBU said, resulting in more than 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers being admitted to hospitals and other medical institutions with varying degrees of chemical poisoning. The UK, which put sanctions on Kirillov in October, and the US have each accused Russia of using the toxic agent chloropicrin.
One theory is that the explosive-laden scooter was placed in front of the Sreda residential building at about 4am on Tuesday. The device was then triggered remotely, set off by mobile phone or radio signal. For this plan to work, the bomber would have needed to monitor the building, waiting until the moment when Kirillov and his aide emerged in darkness.
Russian media said investigators were pursuing various theories. The bomber and his accomplices could have rented an apartment nearby and scanned the entrance with binoculars. Or they could have sat in a parked car. A third version suggested that Ukrainian hackers had gained access to the complex’s surveillance cameras and watched from afar.
The pro-Kremlin Kommersant newspaper said Russia’s investigative committee believed an IED had been attached by duct tape to the scooter. The bomb was filled with plastic explosives and relatively small, it said – the equivalent of about 300 grams of TNT. The device may have been hidden inside the scooter’s headlamp or stuck to its handle.
Whatever the method, the outcome suggests the SBU acted with clinical efficiency. In the months after Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the agency carried out a series of attacks on targets it regarded as enemy propagandists. The apparent goal was to raise morale at home at a time when Russian forces were sweeping across the country.
In August 2022, the SBU blew up a car outside Moscow driven by Darya Dugina, the daughter of the ultranationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin. Dugin is a close ally of Russia’s president. In April the following year, a pro-war military blogger, Vladlen Tatarsky, died in a blast at a cafe in St Petersburg. The bomb had been hidden in a gold statue.
The authorities arrested a Russian woman, Darya Trepova, and claimed she was a supporter of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died in February in a Siberian prison colony. In December 2023, an unknown assailant shot dead Illia Kyva, a former Ukrainian MP who had defected to Moscow shortly before the invasion.
After this attack in a Moscow park, the SBU appears to have changed strategy. Sources in Kyiv suggest that the agency decided to stop targeting bloggers and traitors. Instead, it would pursue Russian commanders, the key military and technical personnel who were personally responsible for murdering Ukrainians. “We decided to go after the specialists,” one source confided.
Details of these missions are secret, but sources indicate the missions would not be possible without the involvement of local Russian collaborators. These appear to be ideologically motivated individuals who oppose Russia’s war and who are willing to take part in dangerous operations. Russian criminals are not involved. “They are scared shitless,” a source said.
Last week, Mikhail Shatsky, a Russian expert involved in modernising missiles launched against Ukraine, was killed near Moscow. Shatsky was the deputy general designer at the Experimental Design Bureau, Mars. It oversaw the upgrading of Kh-59 and Kh-69 cruise missiles, which have been used to bombard Ukrainian cities and civilians. Shatsky’s killing was old-school: he was gunned down.
Tuesday’s more sophisticated assassination of Kirillov will be celebrated in Kyiv as a textbook success. The SBU’s formal name is the Sluzhba bezpeky Ukrainy. It is now jokingly known as the “service of god”, a play in Ukrainian on the initials SBU. The agency has cemented its reputation as an outfit that administers its own form of brutal extrajudicial justice. It is an abrupt and swift form of vengeance, delivered as if from the heavens.
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