Residents in an apartment building on Ryazanky Prospekt in Moscow heard an explosion Tuesday morning and saw two bodies on the ground when they looked out their windows.

The Russian Investigative Committee would later confirm the victims were senior General Igor Kirillov and his assistant, Ilya Polikarpov. 

Investigators said a bomb was planted in an electric scooter placed next to the apartment building entrance. It detonated when two were leaving the building. Kirillov is said to have been under surveillance through a camera installed in a car-sharing vehicle near his home shortly before his assassination.

The Investigative Committee opened a criminal case examining charges of terrorism, murder and illegal arms trafficking. Multiple media outlets said Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) was behind the attack, citing anonymous sources, though a Ukrainian presidential advisor, Mykhailo Podolyak, denied allegations linking Kyiv to the explosion on Tuesday.

Russia's intelligence agency, the FSB, said on Wednesday that it had detained a suspect in the killing. The FSB did not reveal the name of the suspect but said he was a Uzbek citizen born in 1995 who the SBU recruited.

On Tuesday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Kirillov "had spent many years systematically exposing the crimes of the Anglo-Saxons." State Duma representative Yevgeni Revenko said, "The Kyiv regime … showed its criminal nature."

Tuesday's explosion came a day after the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) charged Kirillov in absentia with ordering the use of chemical weapons against the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Assad's reputation launderer

Kirillov's public career began in 2017 when he was appointed commander of Russia's nuclear, biological, and chemical protection forces. Later that year, Kirillov became the Russian government spokesperson regarding a chemical attack that killed dozens of people in the Syrian city of Douma in April 2017.

At the time, the United States, Britain, and France accused then-President Bashar Assad's regime of carrying out the attack and struck several government targets in Syria in response. At a press briefing organized by Russia and Syria in The Hague, Kirillov claimed the chemical attack had been staged.

According to him, the toxic compound sarin was deliberately added to some samples taken from the scene — a claim that has never been independently proven.

False claims about dangerous biological labs in Ukraine

Briefings such as the one in The Hague, with Kirillov as the main speaker, became more frequent after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In his speeches, Kirillov accused the United States of building laboratories in Ukraine to develop biological weapons intended for use against Russia.

According to Kirillov, the US plan was to use drones to deliver mosquitoes infected with the yellow fever virus to areas where Russian troops were deployed. He did not provide any evidence for the accusation. He also did not provide any proof for his statement that a rise in bird flu cases in Russia was due to the migration of infected birds from Ukraine.

During his briefings, Kirillov claimed the Ukrainian army used toxic substances on the frontlines and carried out terrorist attacks. One of his latest claims in August this year was that Ukraine was ready to use a so-called dirty bomb to disperse radioactive matter on its own territory.

Why Kirillov?

German political scientist and Russia expert Hans-Henning Schröder said he sees Kirillov's false claims as propaganda used to justify Russia's unprovoked war against Ukraine. Schröder said Kirillov's purpose was to convince Russians, both inside and outside Russia, that Ukraine was dangerous and that the Russian offensive managed to preempt Kyiv's nefarious plans for Russia.

Schröder pointed out that Kirillov's role as a propagandist could have drawn the attention of the Ukrainian intelligence services. Kirillov, otherwise, would have been of little interest to Ukraine's intelligence services as he did not command troops operationally and was not responsible for deploying units or weapon systems, Schröder added.

'An act of sabotage'

Oleksiy Melnyk, who runs foreign policy and international security programs at the Razumkov Center in Kyiv, said the assassination should not be treated as a terror attack.

"When two states are at war, and an active serviceman of the opposing force is eliminated, it should be classified as an act of sabotage," Melnik said.

There are other potential suspects for the blast beyond the SBU.

Melnik and Schröder said a corporate or interagency conflict could be behind Kirillov's killing. Schröder said Kirillov's assassination might also be seen in the context of the purges in Russia's Ministry of Defense (MoD) that started after Putin dismissed the former minister of defense, Sergei Shoigu, last May.

"One can certainly imagine resource conflicts, where one group conspires against another," Schröder said."However, so far, we actually know very little about violent clashes between rival criminal groups within the Ministry of Defense."

Will it impact the war in Ukraine?

So far, experts don't expect the killing of General Igor Kirillov to have any impact on the course of the war in Ukraine.

Even though Ukraine was prosecuting him for ordering the use of chemical weapons against Ukrainian troops, in his position, Kirillov "was not operationally responsible, but only for possibly providing the chemical weapons," Hans-Henning Schroeder says.

Furthermore, no one in the Russian military or political establishment has announced a retaliation operation for Kirillov's death.

On Wednesday, Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, only promised to raise this issue during a UN Security Council meeting on Friday. Russia had already requested this meeting before Kirillov's assassination, and it will focus on the supply of Western weapons to Ukraine.

This piece was originally published on December 17, 2024 and updated to include the latest developments.

Edited by: Sean M. Sinico