‘Many more Russian war criminals on our list’: Ukraine vows more attacks | russia-ukraine war news

Kyiv, Ukraine – Igor Kirillov, the 54-year-old general who led Russia’s nuclear security forces, was killed just a day after Ukrainian intelligence accused him of ordering the use of banned chemical weapons against Ukrainian troops.

On Tuesday, an explosive hidden in a scooter parked outside a Moscow apartment building blew up Kirillov and his assistant.

Before his death, Kirillov had frequently appeared on Russian talk shows to claim, without providing any evidence, that Kiev was “planning to build a dirty bomb” and that the United States was “breeding” mosquitoes that spread anthrax and cholera. “To runs “biological warfare laboratories” in Ukraine.

The blast occurred in a densely populated and traffic-congested district in southeastern Moscow.

It was the fourth attack on high-profile Russian military figures in less than two months. Ukraine does not always claim responsibility for such attacks but its officials often praise them on social media.

In this case, a Ukrainian official, speaking to Al Jazeera and several other media outlets on condition of anonymity, claimed responsibility for the bombing that killed Kirillov and his colleague.

Kiev has waged a decade-long campaign to crack down on Ukrainian separatists and defectors in Moscow-held areas, as well as Russian military figures and officials, as well as some of their most vocal supporters.

The explosion shattered doors and windows of the apartment building and blew snow from cars parked nearby. According to Kirillov’s former neighbor, it was like “the breath of death.”

Ulyana, who walks her dog near the general’s home, said the attack made her “really think about what your neighbors do for a living”.

“You feel like war is knocking on your door. “You feel the breath of death, even if it was the death of someone who deserved it,” the 34-year-old man, who attended anti-Kremlin rallies before fleeing Russia last year, told Al Jazeera.

He unknowingly repeated the words of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).

“He was a legitimate target and deserved death,” an SBU source told Al Jazeera. “And there are many more Russian war criminals on our list.”

Ukraine’s eradication campaign “does not contradict international law, it is about an attack on enemy territory, aimed at enemy combatants”, Kiev-based analyst Igor Tyshkevich told Al Jazeera.

Its most recent victims include missile and drone designer Mikhail Shatsky, who was shot dead in a Moscow park on December 12.

On 9 December, a car bomb killed separatist “prison officer” Sergei Ievsukov in the rebel-held city of Donetsk. In July 2022, an explosion at the Olenivka prison he managed killed 53 Ukrainian prisoners of war and injured more than 100.

In mid-November, Captain Valery Trankovsky, who commanded missile launches from occupied Crimea, died in a pool of blood after his car was blown up in the city of Sevastopol. A launch in central Ukraine in July 2022 killed 29 civilians.

The eradication campaign is growing, reaching far into Russia and targeting senior figures in the Kremlin’s war effort.

“What impresses me is the level of its systemic development,” Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy chief of the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, told Al Jazeera.

He said the campaign would continue even if Kiev and Moscow negotiate a ceasefire or peace deal.

“Retaliation will extend to war criminals regardless of their validity period and wherever they are,” Romanenko said. “They should feel bad, (and) their families should see how their man suffers with guilt until his (death) sentence is carried out.”

Ukrainian separatist leaders and powerful figures in the south-eastern region of Donbass were the first victims of the campaign.

Ukrainian operatives mostly blew them up in elevators, restaurants, and cars – giving rise to a joke about Kiev’s “elevator forces”.

More casualties followed Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 when alleged collaborators were shot, blown up and poisoned in the occupied territories.

Ukrainian intelligence agencies have also monitored people who send important information to Russia, such as coordinates of military units, energy infrastructure or air defense installations.

They have a group of civilian volunteers who scour social networks and leaked databases, use open-source intelligence (OSINT) tools to identify Russian military leaders accused of war crimes – and insist that they be brought to justice. Must be killed.

“Yes, I am calling for systemic violence against murderers,” Maxim Bakhmatov, a businessman and occasional stand-up comedian, told Al Jazeera in November 2022.

He led an effort to publish detailed personal information about 1,400 Russian soldiers accused of torturing, raping and killing civilians in Bucha, a suburb of Kiev, in early 2022.

Evidence from Ukrainian officials and global human rights groups links Russian forces to atrocities in Bucha, whose name has become synonymous with brutal mass killings of civilians. Russia rejects the claims.

The campaign “moved” to Russia just a few months after the full-scale invasion, but started with a mistake.

In August 2022, a bomb exploded in the car of Alexander Dugin, a far-right Russian “philosopher” who had said that Ukrainians should be “killed, killed, killed”.

But the explosion instead killed Dugin’s daughter Darya, who had actively supported the war.

Then in May 2023, another car bomb wounded separatist commander and novelist Zakhar Prilepin, who has admitted committing war crimes in Donbass.

In December 2023, pro-Kremlin Ukrainian lawmaker Ilya Kiva, who had fled to Russia, was shot contract-style in a forest outside Moscow just after recording a video lambasting Kiev.

‘Highest possible achievement’

So far, Kirillov is the highest-ranking Russian targeted by Ukrainian intelligence.

According to Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher at the University of Bremen in Germany, killing a commander of such caliber is “the highest possible achievement”.

“It’s a job any intelligence operator can be proud of until the last days,” he told Al Jazeera.

He said top Moscow officials never applied the “elevator forces” joke to themselves.

“And they should have done so,” he said – despite the limited abilities of Ukrainian intelligence to deliver explosives and find operatives to carry out attacks.

Moscow claimed that an Uzbek citizen had placed the bomb near Kirillov’s home in exchange for $100,000 and transfer to Europe.

Kirillov was assassinated shortly after attending a defense conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Kirillov’s death “once again emphasizes that no matter how successful we are on the battlefield, no matter how excited we are, no matter how much we talk about gaining the upper hand, the other side always has the opportunity to inflict pain on us.” It happens,” pro-Kremlin journalist and official Andrey Medvedev wrote on Telegram.

He said the killing would distract Ukrainians from the daily bad news coming from the front lines and rumors of lowering the conscription age from 25 to 18.

However, some Ukrainians do not feel deterred.

“We are in deep shit. We are losing the war, we wasted eight years” Diana Hordienko, a nurse in Kiev, told Al Jazeera amid the 2014 separatist rebellion and Russian invasion.

“The Russians will retaliate and more innocent people will be killed,” he said.

On Friday morning, Russian bombers launched a missile attack on Kiev, killing one and injuring seven.