Earlier this week Ukraine’s security services charged Igor Kirillov with the use of banned chemical weapons.
The head of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Defense Forces, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, was killed on Dec. 17 by a bomb planted near an apartment block in Moscow.
Russia’s Investigative Committee said that Kirillov’s assistant also died when an explosive device, hidden in a scooter parked near the apartment block, detonated.
The committee’s spokesperson Svetlana Petrenko said in a statement, “Investigators, forensic experts, and operational services are working at the scene. Investigative and search activities are being carried out to establish all the circumstances around this crime.”
Russia’s state-owned TASS news agency said the bomb exploded in Moscow’s Ryazansky Prospekt, a road that is four miles from the Kremlin.
On Dec. 16, Kirillov, 54, was sentenced in absentia by a Ukrainian court over Russia’s alleged use of banned chemical weapons during the conflict with Ukraine, which began in Feb. 2022.
Ukraine’s Security Service, the SBU, said they had recorded more than 4,800 uses of chemical weapons on the battlefield since 2022.
Most of those uses involved K-51 combat grenades.
Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev, who is deputy head of the country’s security council, said the attack was an attempt by Ukraine to distract attention away from its failures on the battlefield, and he promised Kyiv’s “senior military-political leadership will face inevitable retribution.”
During the 105th Session of the Executive Council of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in March, the Ukrainian delegation said, “Russian head of the Russian terrorist CBRN troops, I. Kirillov has alleged that Ukraine is using substances prohibited by the Convention on the front line … In fact, Kirillov’s words have nothing to do with reality. Their purpose is to produce an information environment that supports a future Russian chemical weapon false flag operation on the territory of Ukraine.”
The statement went on to accuse the Russians of using toxic chemicals against Ukrainian troops.
