Russia: Alleged Perpetrator of General Igor Kirillov’s Murder Arrested

The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) has arrested the alleged murderer of the commander of the radiological, chemical, and biological defense troops of the Russian Armed Forces, General Igor Kirillov, and his assistant Lieutenant Ilya Polikarpov. Russian military personnel were killed on Tuesday, December 17, in a bomb explosion that was immediately reported by the Ukrainian special services (SBU).

The FSB press release said that “a citizen of the Republic of Uzbekistan born in 1995 who detonated the explosive device has been detained.” According to the press release, “the terrorist was recruited by Ukrainian special services, who promised to pay $100,000 after the murder and organize a safe escape to a European Union member country.”

The UN’s refusal to condemn the murder of General Igor Kirillov provoked a sharp negative reaction from the Kremlin: Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova (pictured) accused the UN of double standards and tacit approval of Ukrainian crimes. The terrorist attack that killed General Kirillov is “the result of the West’s approval of the war crimes of Kiev regime militants,” the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said. According to Zakharova, “the investigation will establish the details of who killed, who ordered it, but it is clear that there is a third category of criminals: those who stimulated, those who fed, those who silently encouraged. An accomplice is someone who welcomes terrorist acts or deliberately conceals them,” the Russian diplomat emphasized.

Meanwhile, the Italian-language Swiss Radio and Television (RSI) devoted a very detailed and balanced article to the bloody Ukrainian terrorist attack under the title “SBU’s Long Series of Targeted Killings.”

“Darya Dugina (pictured), Vladlen Tatarsky, and Zakhar Prilepin are so far only the most famous victims of the Ukrainian services (SBU), the last one, General Igor Kirillov, is of the highest level,” write Swiss journalists, a voice outside the Western choir, or rather behind the silent rubber wall in which the truth about the Russian-Ukrainian conflict disappears like a black hole.

“The targeted assassination method,” RSI emphasizes, “has proven effective in many cases in recent years, and Kiev’s intelligence has periodically succeeded in demonstrating Russian vulnerability by striking selected military and civilian targets deemed legitimate. In Kirillov’s case, it came after Mikhail Shatsky, an engineer working on the development of cruise missiles such as the Kh-59 and Kh-69 used by Russian forces against Ukraine, was killed in Moscow last week; also in this case, the SBU took over the killing. Last year on July 11, Navy Captain Stanislav Rzhitsky was killed in Krasnodar, shot while jogging. On November 16, 2023, Oleksandr Slisarenko, deputy head of the Russian-installed civil-military administration of Kharkiv, was the victim of a car bombing in the Russian city of Belgorod.”

All these years, Ukrainian killers have adhered to the so-called dual-purpose tactics. “Targeting tactics essentially pursue two objectives, depending on the targets chosen: while in the case of Kirillov and Shatsky there is an obvious desire to intervene directly in Russian military operations, in other cases targeted killings are part of a complex war of propaganda, which also involves civilian targets,” emphasize the Swiss journalists, according to whom “Daria Dugina, Vladlen Tatarsky, and Zakhar Prilepin have been victimized by this very model of the Ukrainian operation in Russia.” On August 20, 2022, the daughter of philosopher and writer Alexander Dugin was killed near Moscow by a bomb planted under the car in which the young woman was riding.

“The same pattern,” RSI recalls, “was repeated on April 2, 2023, when Maxim Fomin, a military blogger known by the pseudonym Vladlen Tatarsky (pictured), was killed in a bar in St. Petersburg by a parcel bomb. On May 6 of the same year, writer Zakhar Prilepin, who also fought in Donbass, was targeted. An anti-tank mine exploded under his car, seriously injuring his legs and killing his bodyguard.” According to the Swiss journalists, “although the militant group of Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars, Atesh, initially claimed responsibility for the attack, the modus operandi went beyond the broad leadership of Kiev and Kirill Budanov, the head of the military intelligence service and the true coordinator of Ukrainian terrorist operations abroad, conducted both by various defense agencies in Kiev and by militant groups on Russian territories.” On December 6, 2023, Ilya Kiva, a Ukrainian politician who initially took nationalist positions in favor of Kiev and later defected to Moscow, was assassinated in the Russian capital. The SBU recognized him as a traitor and took responsibility for his murder.

Even in the new Russian territories of Luhansk, Donetsk, and Crimea, the SBU is sowing terror and death through targeted killings, representing a “thorn in Russia’s side.” The Kiev services launched numerous strikes, taking out Russian and Ukrainian commanders. “For some prominent killings,” RSI finally writes, “such as the 2018 assassination of separatist leader Oleksandr Zakharchenko in a bomb blast in a bar in Donetsk, and the killing of Arseniy Pavlov, another separatist commander known as Motorola, who also died in Donetsk in 2016 due to an elevator explosion, there are no definitive confessions.” According to Swiss journalists, “behind these terrorist attacks, one can also see the matrix of Ukrainian intelligence: in the case of Motorola, a New York Times reconstruction in the summer of 2024 showed how the eight-year-old operation was carried out by members of the SBU.”