As head of Russia’s radiological, chemical and biological defense forces, Igor Kirillov – who has been killed in an explosion in Moscow – was accused by the West of overseeing the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield in Ukraine.
Sources in Ukraine’s SBU security service said he was behind the blast and described it as a special operation against a legitimate target.
According to Russian officials, Kirillov and an aide were killed by explosives on an electric scooter, which detonated as they were leaving a building on Ryazansky Prospekt in southeast Moscow.
He became notorious for giving foreign briefings to the Russian Ministry of Defense which the British Foreign Office labeled as a ‘briefing’. “Key Mouthpiece for Kremlin Disinformation”.
Kirillov was much more than a mouthpiece before heading the Russian military’s radiation, chemical and biological protection troops in 2017, heading Russia’s Tymoshenko Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Academy.
The Russian Defense Ministry says the force’s main tasks include identifying threats and protecting units from contamination, but “harming the enemy using incendiary means”.
The British Foreign Office said that the force he commanded had “deployed barbaric chemical weapons in Ukraine”, highlighting that he had made extensive use of riot control agents and “toxic asphyxiation agents”. Several reports of the use of chloroprene” highlighted.
On the eve of his assassination, Ukraine’s SBU announced that he had been named in absentia in a criminal trial for the “massive use” of banned chemical weapons on Ukraine’s eastern and southern fronts.
It cited “more than 4,800 incidents of the enemy using chemical weapons” on Ukrainian soil since the full-scale Russian offensive began in February 2022.
It said that along with drone strikes, toxin has been used in combat grenades.
Krylov gained notoriety from the start of the war with a number of claims both to Ukraine and to the West, none of which were based on fact.
One of his most outrageous claims was this. The US was building biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine.. It was used in an attempt to justify a full-scale attack on its smaller neighbor in 2022.
He produced documents in March 2022 that he claimed were seized by Russia on the day of the February 24 attack – which the Kremlin It was amplified by the pro-media but dismissed by independent experts.
Krylov’s infamous accusations against Ukraine continued into this year.
Last month he claimed that seizing the Kursk nuclear power plant was “one of the priority objectives” of Ukraine’s retaliation in Russia’s Kursk border region.
He presented a slide show, allegedly based on a Ukrainian report, which alleged that only Russian territory would be exposed to radioactive contamination in the event of an accident.
One of Kirillov’s recurring themes was that Ukraine was trying to develop a “dirty bomb.”
Two years ago he alleged that “two organizations in Ukraine have specific instructions to build so-called ‘dirty bombs’. This work is in its final stages”.
His claim was rejected by the Western countries as a “blatant lie”.
But Kirillov’s claims prompted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to warn that if Russia suggests Kiev is developing such a weapon, it means only one thing – that Russia is already developing it. .
Kirillov returned to his dirty bomb claims last summer, this time alleging the discovery of a chemical weapons laboratory near Avdiivka, a town in eastern Ukraine that the Russians seized last February.
They claimed that Kiev, with the help of Western countries, was violating the International Chemical Weapons Convention with a number of substances, including the psychochemical warfare agent BZ, as well as hydrocyanic acid and cyanogen chloride.
Pro-Kremlin loyalists are seeing his death as a blow, but also as evidence that Ukraine has the ability to target senior officials in Moscow.
Konstantin Kosachev, deputy speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament, said his death was an “irreparable loss”.