Russia detains a man it says killed a general on Ukraine’s orders
By Anatoly Kurmanaev
BERLIN — Russian authorities said Wednesday (18) that they had detained a suspect in the killing of a senior military officer, Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, a major development in the most prominent political assassination case in the country since the start of the war in Ukraine.
The suspect, a 29-year-old citizen of Uzbekistan whose name was not released, was detained in a village outside Moscow, a spokesperson for Russia’s prosecutor’s office said.
The spokesperson said the detainee had confessed that Ukrainian intelligence agencies recruited him to kill Kirillov, 54, who was in charge of the Russian military’s nuclear and chemical weapons protection forces.
An official with Ukraine’s security service, known as the SBU, said Tuesday (17) that Ukraine had been responsible for the killing, which took place in central Moscow on Tuesday. He discussed sensitive intelligence on the condition of anonymity.
The general’s killing came days after reports began to emerge about the death of a rocket scientist in Moscow’s outskirts. The scientist, Mikhail Shatsky, worked for the state-run military-industrial firm MARS.
One current and one former senior Ukrainian official said Shatsky was killed in an operation organized by Ukraine’s military intelligence service, known as the HUR, because of what they believed was his complicity in war crimes against Ukrainian civilians.
The Russian government has not commented on the death of Shatsky, and the HUR declined to comment when asked about him.
The detainee accused of killing Kirillov travelled to Moscow and placed a bomb under a scooter near the general’s home, the prosecutor’s office spokesperson said.
He also installed a camera inside a parked rental car that transmitted the general’s movements to intelligence agents in Ukraine, she added. He was promised $100,000 and safe passage to Europe for carrying out the plot, she said. An aide to the general was also killed when the bomb was detonated.
“We got more proof that the Kyiv regime does not stop at anything, including terrorism,” Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesperson, told reporters Wednesday. He added that President Vladimir Putin had offered condolences to the general’s family.
Kirillov was the most senior Russian official to have been assassinated away from the battlefield since the start of the war. Previous assassination attempts have targeted Russian propagandists and more junior military officers.
On Wednesday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, said the country would raise the killing of Kirillov at the scheduled meeting of the UN Security Council on Friday (20).
“We are certain that all the organizers and executors of the murder of Igor Kirillov will be found and punished, whoever they are and wherever they may be,” Zakharova said.
The general’s killing is the latest embarrassment for Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, the FSB, which has assumed greater power and influence since the start of the war in Ukraine nearly three years ago.
The FSB has blamed Ukraine for most terrorist attacks and major accidents in the country since the invasion, usually without providing evidence.
Critics have said such tactics have allowed Russia’s intelligence agencies to deflect the blame for their own failures to detect domestic threats, often associated with Islamist groups.
Analysts have said that the FSB has been blindsided by several attacks associated with Islamism, including the deadliest terrorist attack in Russia in more than a decade because they were excessively focused on combating Ukrainian sabotage and terrorism operations.
The admission from a Ukrainian intelligence official that Ukraine orchestrated the killing of Kirillov suggests that the FSB has now failed to protect the country’s leadership from precisely such a threat.
After the killing, some Russian ultranationalist commentators accused the country’s secret services of ineptitude.
“The enemy’s secret services are acting with impunity on the territory of the Russian Federation, and above all in the capital and the metropolises,” Yuri Kotenok, a prominent Russian war correspondent, wrote on social media Tuesday. “This is mayhem.”
The suspect’s citizenship of Uzbekistan could be consequential. A combination of nationalist war fervour and the participation of citizens of Central Asian countries in recent terrorist attacks have led to a rise in xenophobia and a tightening of immigration laws in Russia.
The backlash against Central Asian immigrants, by far the largest group of foreign workers in Russia, has come at a time of record labour shortages.
Russia’s business groups have been concerned that new measures against migrants would tighten the labour market further, with destabilizing effects on the economy.
-New York Times
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