The head of the Russian military's biological and chemical weapons department, Lieutenant General Igor Kirilov, was killed along with his deputy early Tuesday in an explosion in Moscow, Russia's Investigative Committee said. Ukrainian security sources told CBS News that the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) killed Kirilov in a special operation. The claim could not be independently confirmed, but Russian officials quickly vowed to retaliate against Ukraine's leaders.
The sources said a scooter with explosives was detonated near Kirilov and his aide outside a residential building in the Russian capital. A video circulating online shows the two men exiting a building just before an electric scooter parked near the entrance explodes.
"Kirillov was a war criminal and an absolutely legitimate target, as he gave orders to use banned chemical weapons against the Ukrainian military," an informed SBU source told CBS News. "Such an inglorious end awaits anyone who kills Ukrainians. Retribution for war crimes is inevitable."
Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev said Ukraine's leaders would face inevitable retaliation for the killing, Russia's RIA news agency reported.
The bomb was detonated remotely and had a power equivalent to approximately 300 grams of TNT, Russia's state-run TASS news agency said, citing unnamed emergency service sources.
"Investigators, forensic experts and operational services are working at the scene," Svetlana Petrenko, a spokeswoman for Russia's national Investigative Committee, said in a statement. "Operational and investigative activities are being carried out to establish all the circumstances surrounding the crime.
She also said the Kremlin was treating it as a terrorist attack.
Kirilov and the unit he leads have been sanctioned by several countries, including Britain, Canada and the United States, over the use of chemical weapons in Ukraine.
Ukraine's SBU said it has recorded more than 4,800 cases of Russia using chemical weapons on the battlefield since President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion in February 2022. In May, the US State Department announced sanctions against Kirilov's squad, saying the US had recorded the use of chlorpicrin, a poison gas first used in World War I, against Ukrainian troops.
Kirilov, who has been in his post since April 2017, has also been accused by the US government of helping to spread disinformation about biological weapons and research.
In March 2023, about a year from now A full-scale invasion of Russiaon the US State Department said Kirillov "significantly increased his media engagement" to issue repeated, baseless claims that the US government was involved in the creation of both the mpox virus and COVID-19, and that the US was "developing biological weapons capable of selectively targeting to ethnic groups'.
“The US government is concerned that this false narrative could be a prelude to a false flag operationwhere Russia itself uses biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons in Ukraine and then tries to blame Ukraine and/or the United States,” the State Department said at the time.
Russia has denied using any chemical weapons in Ukraine and has in turn accused Kiev of using toxic agents in combat.
Kirilov was convicted in absentia by a Ukrainian court on December 16 of using chemical weapons banned in Ukraine during Russia's military operation in Ukraine which started in February 2022.
Almost three years into Russia's ongoing war, Russian troops are made small but steady progressadding to the nearly one-fifth of Ukraine they already control.
Since the Russian invasion, several prominent figures have been killed in targeted attacks believed to have been carried out by Ukraine.
Daria Dugina, commentator on Russian TV channels and daughter of Kremlin-linked nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin, died in a car bomb attack in 2022 which investigators suspected was directed at her father.
Vladlen Tatarsky, a popular military blogger, died April 2023when a statuette given to him at a party in St. Petersburg exploded. A Russian woman who said she gave the custom figurine to a contact in Ukraine, is convicted and sentenced to 27 years in prison.
In December 2023 Ilya 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 to Ukraine" would share the same fate.
On December 9, a bomb placed under a car in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Donetsk killed Sergey Evsyukov, former warden of Olenovka prison, where dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war died in a July 2022 rocket attack. Another person was injured in the explosion. Russian authorities said they had detained a suspect in the attack.
Editor's note: This article has been updated to reflect that the Russian military, formerly led by Kirilov, does not control the country's nuclear weapons, as previously stated, but only its biological and chemical weapons.
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