Following the assassination of Russian Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the most important questions are: How did the Ukrainians do it, and how will Vladimir Putin respond?
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It took just 200 grams (7 oz.) of high explosives concealed in a casually parked motor scooter on a Moscow side street to kill Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s nuclear, biological, and chemical protection troops.
The unit is responsible for defending Russian forces against nuclear, biological, or chemical attacks, but it is also the division that Russia turns to when it wants to engage in using chemical or incendiary weapons on the battlefield.
The assassination took place at 6:12 a.m., Tuesday, on Ryazansky Prospekt, roughly four miles from the Kremlin. Kirillov, 54, died instantly. His aide, Ilya Polikarpov was also killed. The blast shattered windows of surrounding buildings and damaged the façade of the building that Kirillov had just exited.
Within an hour, Russian media, and especially Moskovsky Komsomolets — a newspaper that often serves as a mouthpiece for Russia’s Federal Security Service, the FSB — had blamed the “terrorist Kyiv regime” for the attack, adding that “the terrorist Kyiv regime must be destroyed.”
Somewhat enigmatically, Dmitry Medvedev, who serves as deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, accused Russia’s enemies of being hasty in claiming responsibility for the attack. “The investigation has barely begun,” Medvedev said, “and yet our enemies have already rushed to announce their involvement.” By late morning, an anonymous official at Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) had confirmed to Ukrainian media outlets that Ukraine was indeed behind the attack.
The more important question was: How had the Ukrainians done it?
The explosives had to be triggered by someone who was in direct line of sight of Kirillov as he approached the scooter. How had Ukraine’s agents known when Kirillov and his aide would exit the building? How had the Ukrainians known that he would even be in the building, and how had they known Kirillov’s likely movements far enough in advance to place the scooter so that it wouldn’t be noticed?
The implication is that the Ukrainians had to have had inside information on the private movements of the Kremlin’s top echelon officials. That means that, from this point on, hardly anyone in Moscow can be considered safe. It also means a likely search for who in Russia’s defense or security services was helping the other side.
By Wednesday, Russian security services arrested a 29-year-old Uzbek who, according to the FSB, admitted to having been recruited by the Ukrainian special services to carry out the assassination.
The Uzbek said that he had been offered $100,000 and a visa to Western Europe in exchange for getting the job done. He had then received the explosive device and video equipment that he installed in a rental car parked near the site. That enabled him and his handlers to trigger the explosion remotely.
The surprisingly quick arrest took some of the immediate heat off the FSB, which had been unable to prevent the assassination, but it left a number of questions unanswered. If the FSB had been able to immediately identify the Uzbek, why hadn’t they prevented the assassination? How had the Uzbek, an apparently recent hire, known about the general’s daily movements? Who were the Uzbek’s handlers?
Even if those questions are answered, it is clear that from now on no one in the Russian military’s higher ranks or in Putin’s inner circle can consider themselves safe. Ukrainians believe that the Russians have been trying to assassinate Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for at least three years. They have failed. The Ukrainians are clearly proving more successful and are beginning to resemble Israel’s vaunted Mossad when it comes to the technical efficiency of carrying out a hit.
The Ukrainians quickly made it clear that they had more than enough reason for targeting Kirillov as a legitimate war criminal. The day preceding the attack, Ukraine’s prosecutors charged Kirillov in absentia for overseeing the deployment of 4,800 chemical weapons since the start of the war.
Kirillov was specifically charged with using chloropicrin gas — an agent that is often used in very diluted quantities as a riot control gas, but is specifically forbidden by international law from being used as a weapon against troops in war time. In even mild doses the gas causes intense irritation in the lungs and eyes and can be used to flush troops from trenches and bunkers so they can be killed by conventional weapons.
Even more serious, Kirillov is credited with helping develop the TOS-2 thermobaric rocket launcher, known familiarly as the Tosochka, a motorized heavy flamethrower. The TOS-2 fires 220-mm thermobaric rockets, which create a high-temperature fireball that literally sucks all the oxygen out of the air. That results in an extremely high-pressure concussive blast that crushes everything within range. If it does not cause immediate death, it can break eardrums and crush internal organs.
Both the US and Britain had condemned Russia for violating the Chemical Weapons Convention in May. Britain sanctioned both Kirillov and his nuclear, chemical, and biological protection troops, calling their actions “barbaric” and “abhorrent.”
For his part, Kirillov had shown no compunction against spreading conspiracy theories and disinformation. He had made baseless claims about “Ukrainian biolabs funded by the West” and he had accused NATO of orchestrating chemical attacks against Russian troops. One of his more bizarre claims was that the US planned to use drones to spread disease-infected mosquitoes across Russia.
A week before Kirillov’s assassination, another Russian weapons expert, Mikhail Shatsky, was gunned down on the outskirts of Moscow. Hromadske, a Ukrainian publication citing sources in Ukraine’s Security Service, reported that Shatsky had been heavily involved in the modernization of Russia’s cruise missiles and drones.
Hromadske went on to note that, from here on out, anyone involved in Russia’s military-industrial complex is a legitimate target. The deaths of Kirillov and Shatsky emphasized the point.
The next question is how Vladimir Putin intends to respond, and whether these latest assassinations will be enough to expand Putin’s already stressed red lines.
