Kyiv, Ukraine – Igor Kirillov, the 54-year-old general who led Russia’s nuclear protection forces, was assassinated just one day after Ukrainian intelligence accused him of ordering the use of banned chemical weapons against Ukrainian servicemen.
Explosives hidden in a scooter parked outside a Moscow apartment building blew up Kirillov and his assistant on Tuesday.
Before his death, Kirillov had frequented Russian talk shows to claim without providing any evidence that Kyiv “plans to create a dirty bomb” and the United States runs “biological warfare labs” in Ukraine to “breed” mosquitoes that transmit anthrax and cholera.
The blast took place in a densely populated and traffic-clogged district in southeastern Moscow.
It was the fourth hit on high-profile Russian military figures in less than two months. Ukraine does not always claim responsibility for such attacks but its officials often laud them on social media.
In this case, a Ukrainian official, talking to Al Jazeera and several other media outlets on condition of anonymity, claimed responsibility for the bombing that killed Kirillov and his aide.
Kyiv has operated a decade-old campaign to whittle down Russian military figures and officials, as well as some of their vocal backers, along with Ukrainian separatists and turncoats in Moscow-occupied areas.
The explosion shattered doors and windows of the apartment building and shook off snow from cars parked close by. It was like a “breath of death”, according to Kirillov’s ex-neighbour.
Ulyana, who used to walk her dog near the general’s house, said the attack made her “really think about what your neighbours do for a living”.
“You feel the war knocking on your door. You feel the breath of death, even if it’s the death of someone who deserved it,” the 34-year-old, who took part in anti-Kremlin rallies before leaving Russia last year, told Al Jazeera.
She inadvertently repeated the Security Service of Ukraine’s (SBU) wording.
“He was a legitimate target and deserved death,” an SBU source told Al Jazeera. “And there are many more Russian war criminals on our list.”
Ukraine’s elimination campaign “doesn’t contradict international law, it’s about strikes on enemy territory, aimed at enemy combatants”, Kyiv-based analyst Igar Tyshkevich told Al Jazeera.
Its most recent victims include missile and drone designer Mikhail Shatsky, who was gunned down on December 12 in a Moscow park.
On December 9, a car bomb killed separatist “prison official” Sergey Evsyukov in the rebel-controlled city of Donetsk. In July 2022, an explosion in the Olenivka penitentiary he managed killed 53 Ukrainian war prisoners and wounded more than 100.
In mid-November, Captain Valery Trankovsky, who commanded missile launches from annexed Crimea, bled to death after his car was blown up in the city of Sevastopol. One of the launches killed 29 civilians in central Ukraine in July 2022.
The elimination campaign is evolving, reaching farther into Russia and targeting senior figures in the Kremlin’s war effort.
“What impresses me is the level of its systemic development,” Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy chief of General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, told Al Jazeera.
He said the campaign will continue even if Kyiv and Moscow negotiate a ceasefire or a peace deal.
“Retaliation will reach the war criminals irrespective of the validity period and of where they are,” Romanenko said. “They should feel bad, [and] their families should see how their man is tormented by guilt until his [death] sentence is executed.”
Ukrainian separatist leaders and strongmen in the southeastern region of Donbas were the campaign’s first victims.
Ukrainian operatives mostly blew them up – in elevators, restaurants and cars – spawning a joke about Kyiv’s “elevator forces”.
More casualties followed Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 when alleged collaborators were shot, blown up and poisoned in occupied regions.
Ukrainian intelligence agencies have also tracked down people who pass vital information, such as the coordinates of military units, energy infrastructure or air defence installations, to Russia.
They have a legion of civilian volunteers who comb through social networks and leaked databases, use open-source intelligence (OSINT) tools to identify Russian military leaders accused of war crimes – and insist that they should be killed.
“Yes, I’m calling for systemic violence against the killers,” Maksym Bakhmatov, a businessman and occasional stand-up comedian, told Al Jazeera in November 2022.
He led an effort to publish detailed personal information on 1,400 Russian servicemen who were accused of torturing, raping and killing civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha in early 2022.
A body of evidence from Ukrainian officials and global human rights groups links Russian forces to atrocities in Bucha, whose name has become a synonym for harrowing mass killings of civilians. Russia rejects the claims.
The campaign “moved” to Russia just months after the full-scale invasion, but began with a blunder.
In August 2022, a bomb ripped through the car that belonged to Aleksandr Dugin, a far-right Russian “philosopher” who has said that Ukrainians should be “killed, killed, killed”.
But the blast instead assassinated Dugin’s daughter Darya, who also actively supported the war.
Then in May 2023, another car bomb wounded Zakhar Prilepin, a separatist commander and novelist who admitted to committing war crimes in Donbas.
In December 2023, Ilya Kiva, a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian lawmaker who fled to Russia, was shot contract-style in a forest outside Moscow right after recording a video lambasting Kyiv.
‘Highest possible achievement’
So far, Kirillov is the highest-ranking Russian targeted by Ukrainian intelligence.
The killing of a commander of such calibre is the “highest possible achievement,” according to Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany’s Bremen University.
“This is the deed to be proud of until the end of days for any intelligence operative,” he told Al Jazeera.
He said that Moscow’s top brass never applied the “elevator forces” joke to themselves.
“And they should have,” he said – despite Ukrainian intelligence’s limited capabilities to deliver explosives and find operatives to carry out the attacks.
Moscow claimed that an Uzbek national planted the bomb near Kirillov’s house in exchange for $100,000 and relocation to Europe.
Kirillov was killed soon after he participated in a defence conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Kirillov’s death “yet again emphasises that no matter how we succeed on the battlefield, how euphoric we are, how we talk about getting an upper hand, the other side always has a chance to painfully pinprick us,” pro-Kremlin journalist and official Andrey Medvedev wrote on Telegram.
He said that the assassination would distract everyday Ukrainians from the bad news from the front line and rumours about lowering the conscription age from 25 to 18.
However, some Ukrainians do not feel distracted.
“We’re in deep s**t. We’re losing the war, we wasted eight years” between the 2014 separatist uprising and the Russian invasion, Diana Hordienko, a nurse in Kyiv, told Al Jazeera.
“Russians will retaliate and more innocent people will die,” she said.
On Friday morning, Russian bombers launched a missile attack on Kyiv that killed one and wounded seven.
