Live Updates: Russian General Igor Kirillov Accused by Ukraine Killed in Moscow Blast

The explosion that killed Igor Kirillov on Tuesday appears to have been the war’s most ambitious targeted attack on Russian soil so far, carried out by the Ukrainian security services (a source familiar with the operation has claimed) and strikes not only at the core of Russia’s military, but close to the heart of the nation’s capital.

An exploding scooter taking out a senior general is certainly not a good look for Russia’s beefed-up internal security apparatus. But it’s also a measure of the urgency Ukraine feels when it comes to wresting back the initiative in this war by any means possible, as the clock ticks down to Donald Trump’s return to the White House and Russia continues its steady advance on the Eastern Front.

Kirillov, who heads Russia’s radiological, biological and chemical protection forces, believed that Ukraine and its allies had played a particularly destructive role in the conflict, responsible for the widespread use of chemical agents and riots such as battlefield. He was also an expert in deploying disinformation, an important tool for maintaining support for the war at home. In one of his last public appearances in November, he claimed that Ukraine’s main goal when it invaded Russia’s Kursk region was to capture the Kursk nuclear power plant, regurgitating a two-year-old Russian conspiracy theory that Ukraine planned to build a dirty bomb . .

Assassinations of key military figures on Russian soil, either directly or indirectly linked to Ukraine, have been a hallmark of this war. Last July, a former submarine commander, Stanislav Rzhitsky, was shot dead in the southern city of Krasnodar while out jogging. And yet Kirillov’s death marks the fourth such incident in the past two months alone.

In October, Dmitry Golenkov, a pilot with Russia’s 52nd Heavy Bomber Regiment, was bludgeoned to death with a hammer in Russia’s Bryansk region. In mid-November, a source with Ukraine’s security services told CNN it was responsible for a car bomb in Sevastopol, Crimea, that killed the chief of staff of the Black Sea Fleet’s missile ships. And less than a week ago, the deputy chief designer of Russia’s Mars Design Bureau was shot in a Moscow park. CNN’s Ukrainian security source confirmed Kyiv was behind his killing and said he was responsible for upgrading some of the cruise missiles fired at Ukraine.

Like all employees of the Russian Defense Ministry, Kirillov is replaceable, and his death is unlikely to cause Russia to suddenly reverse course on chemical weapons. And yet, like many of Ukraine’s attacks on Russian soil, there is an informational component here – a signal to the Russian military that individuals are vulnerable wherever they are, and to the Russian people – the latest attempt to puncture the facade of , that everything is underway. to plan.