By Galina Korol | 2025-01-06

KYIV -- An assassination in Moscow makes clear yet again the long reach of Ukrainian intelligence agencies in pursuing top Russian officers, analysts say.

Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, who was killed December 17 in Moscow, was "the highest-ranking victim among those who supported the Russian aggression in Ukraine," media outlets reported.

On December 17, a video taken by a dashboard camera circulated on Telegram's Russian channels.

The video, shot on Ryazansky Prospect in Moscow, shows two men walking out of an apartment building in the early hours of the morning. An electric scooter is parked on the street.

Eleven seconds into the video, a flash of light and an explosion occur. At that moment Kirillov, commander of Russian radiation, chemical and biological protection forces, is killed alongside his aide Ilya Polikarpov.

Kirillov, 54, took his final post in 2017, after a rise through army ranks.

He was notorious for unfounded statements about foreign bio-labs. For instance, he said that under US control, Ukraine was developing biological weapons, including viruses that could be transmitted through mosquitoes.

"I don't know if combat mosquitoes came to Kirillov last night, but a scooter did show up right at his home," Taras Zagorodniy, a Ukrainian political analyst and managing partner of the National Anti-Crisis Group, told Kontur.

"This day will definitely go down in the history of the Russia-Ukraine war as the date of [its] most audacious and successful elimination," he said.

The Russian investigation found that the explosives that killed Kirillov were placed in the scooter parked near the building entrance.

The bomb was activated remotely, investigators suspect. It had the explosive power of about 300 grams of TNT, Meduza reported on December 17.

Failed attempt to spin

"The adversary's intelligence services feel at home on Russian soil, and in the capital and the mega-cities act practically with impunity ... They're on the prowl, and they're able to choose their victim/target. It's total lawlessness," Yuri Kotenok, a pro-Kremlin war correspondent, wrote on his Telegram channel December 17.

In an effort to put a positive spin on the shocking news of Kirillov's assassination, Russian law enforcement swiftly reported that on December 18 it had arrested in the Moscow area the presumptive killer -- an Uzbek citizen born in 1995 -- and his accomplice.

Speaking in broken Russian during an interrogation, the man alleged that he had been recruited by Ukrainian intelligence. It promised him $100,000 and a European passport in exchange for killing Kirillov, he said.

The video from the interrogation has no credibility at all, Mykhailo Prytula, a Ukrainian analyst in military counterintelligence and reservist colonel in Ukraine's security service, known as the SBU, told Kontur.

"This announcement about the arrest of a suspect doesn't hold up at all. From a purely logical standpoint, just look at this video, look at the [steady] hands of this Uzbek who's sitting calmly in front of the camera talking," said Prytula.

The Uzbek's claims of understanding the technical details of the slaying are "nonsense," said Prytula.

"If [Ukrainian agents] had hired some Uzbek, he would have had no clue what the bag was, what he was putting down, where and for what. No one reveals these things," Prytula said.

'A legitimate military target'

Ukrainian authorities told the BBC and other media that they had assassinated Kirillov.

"A source in Ukraine's SBU security service claimed Kirillov was 'a legitimate target' and alleged he had carried out war crimes," the BBC reported.

On December 16, one day before Kirillov was killed, Ukraine announced that it suspected Kirillov of being behind the large-scale use of banned chemical weapons against Ukrainian troops in eastern and southern Ukraine.

Chemical weapons "aren't this general's greatest sin," Prytula said.

Kirillov's subordinates "historically have flamethrower systems," he added. "This includes a nasty weapon, the 'Solntsepyok [Blazing Sunlight],' a heavy flamethrower system that is deadly for civilians and that Russia has used not only on the front but when it was destroying Mariupol."

"So taking that into account, Kirillov is a totally legal and legitimate target."

"It's not surprising that 'Budanov's agents' are all over Russia, as Ukraine's intelligence must operate everywhere in Russia where there are troops and forces," Prytula said, referring to Kyrylo Budanov, director of Ukraine's military intelligence.

Moscow: a 'dangerous' place

Targeting Kirillov was unprecedented globally, Zagorodniy said.

"In all of World War II not a single country's intelligence services eliminated generals in enemy capitals. ... But it turned out that there are no unrealistic challenges for our intelligence services," he said.

Ukraine began hunting individuals who were undermining its sovereignty in 2014, after the illegal annexation of Crimea and formation of "people's republics" in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces.

Ukrainian authorities targeted collaborators and participants in the "Russian spring," the wave of Moscow-backed unrest in 2014 in Ukraine.

However, since the full-scale Russian invasion began in 2022, they have trained their sights on Russian military commanders and propagandists.

"Kyiv sent a message that even the highest-level officials responsible for Russia's war effort and crimes cannot feel safe, even in Moscow," Andrius Tursa, Central and Eastern Europe advisor at the US consultancy Teneo, told the Wall Street Journal about Kirillov's death.

Ukrainian intelligence has streamlined the removal of adversaries, surpassing its former KGB counterparts, Igor Eidman, a Russian sociologist and journalist, told Kontur.

It has turned Moscow, even though it teems with cameras and secret police, into a dangerous place for Russia's military leadership.

"Ukrainian intelligence can now retaliate against Russian war criminals, including right in the Russian capital," Eidman said. "In my view, this puts a lot of stress on the Russian leadership and demoralizes it."