A top Russian general has been killed in a bomb blast in Moscow

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A senior Russian general died after a bomb exploded at the door of his Moscow home early Tuesday, investigators said, killing him and an aide.

The Investigative Committee of Russia, the main crime branch, said that Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, the head of the army’s nuclear, chemical and biological defense service, died in an explosion at caused by a bomb planted on a scooter.

Kirillov is the most prominent military officer to have been killed since Russia’s founding filled with the scale of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Ukraine’s SBU security service had previously issued a “notice of suspicion” – essentially a warrant – for Kirillov in connection with “committed war crimes” against forces in Kyiv.

An SBU official declined to comment on Tuesday.

Kirillov was hit by UK sanctions in October “for the export of dangerous chemical weapons to Ukraine”, including the poison agent chloropicrin.

The UK said that Kirillov was also a “key mouthpiece for Kremlin disinformation”, referring to public affairs where he regularly accused Kyiv of planning to use chemical weapons and to produce a nuclear “dirty bomb”.

Mash and 112, two news outlets on the social media app Telegram with ties to Russian law enforcement, published a photo of two bodies in the snow outside an apartment building on Moscow’s Ryazansky Prospekt, which surrounded by glass panes from broken windows.

The scooter bomb contained between 100 and 300 grams of TNT, according to Russian media, citing investigative sources.

The SBU statement on Monday said that Kirillov was “responsible for the extensive use of prohibited chemical weapons by the Russians against the Defense Forces in eastern and southern Ukraine”.

It accused him of “more than 4,800 cases of the use of chemical weapons (which) have been reported since the beginning of the total war”.

Ukrainian soldiers have recounted to the Financial Times the events in which they were attacked by chemical weapons during the war with the Russians.

The US State Department said that Russia used the chemical agent chloropicrin against Ukrainian forces, in violation of the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention.

Tuesday’s bombings signaled the work of Ukrainian intelligence agencies inside Russia, where they have planted a network of undercover operatives to carry out targeted assassinations of key military personnel and acts of sabotage against the army of their enemies to hinder the continuous attack on Moscow.

Ukraine’s intelligence agencies rarely claim clear responsibility for these killings.

Last year Kirillov even said that Ukraine had plans to introduce special US-made drones with “infected mosquitoes” that would spread malaria among Russian troops.