A senior Russian general was killed by a bomb hidden in a scooter outside his apartment building in Moscow on Tuesday, a day after Ukrainian security services filed criminal charges against him. A Ukrainian official said the service carried out the attack.

lieutenant general Igor Kirilovhead of the military forces for nuclear, biological and chemical protection, was killed while going to his office. Kirilov’s assistant was also killed in the attack.

Kirilov, 54, was under sanctions from several countries, including Great Britain and Canada, for his actions in Moscow’s war in Ukraine. On Monday, Ukraine’s Security Service, or 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 they were not authorized to release the information, described Kirilov as a “war criminal and a perfectly legitimate target.”

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

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

Kirilov, who took his current job in 2017, was one of the most prominent people to make the allegations. He has held numerous briefings to accuse Ukraine’s military of using toxic agents and planning to launch a radioactive attack – claims that Ukraine and its Western allies have dismissed as propaganda.

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The bomb used in Tuesday’s attack was detonated remotely, according to Russian media reports. Pictures from the scene showed broken windows and burnt brick.

An SBU official provided a video he said showed the bombing. It shows the two men leaving the building shortly before an explosion fills the frame.

Russia’s top state investigative agency said it was investigating Kirilov’s death as a case of terrorism, and officials in Moscow vowed to punish Ukraine.

Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russia’s Security Council chaired by President Vladimir Putin, described the attack as an attempt by Kiev to divert public attention from its military failures and vowed that its “senior military-political leadership will face inevitable revenge”.

Over the past year, Russia has been on the front lines of the war, pushing ever deeper into the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine despite heavy losses. Ukraine attempted to change the dynamic by invading Russia’s Kursk region, but continued to slowly lose ground on its own territory.

Since Russia invaded, several prominent figures have been killed in targeted attacks believed to have been carried out by Ukraine.

Darya Dugina, a commentator on Russian TV channels and the daughter of Kremlin-linked nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin, was killed in a 2022 car bomb that investigators suspected was aimed at her father.

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Vladlen Tatarsky, a popular military blogger, died in April 2023, when a statue presented to him at a party in St. Petersburg exploded. A Russian woman, who said she gave the figurine as a gift at the behest of a contact in Ukraine, was sentenced to 27 years in prison.

In December 2023, Illia Kiva, a former pro-Moscow Ukrainian MP who fled to Russia, was shot and killed near Moscow. Ukraine’s military intelligence service praised the killing, warning that other “traitors of Ukraine” would share the same fate.

On December 9, a car bomb in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Donetsk killed Sergei Yevsyukov, the former warden of Olenivka prison where dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war were killed in a July 2022 rocket attack. Another person was injured in the explosion. Russian authorities said they had arrested a suspect in the attack.

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Associated Press writer Illia Novikov contributed from Kiev, Ukraine.

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