WASHINGTON — On the snowy sidewalk of a drab residential street in Moscow, blood, soot and the mangled remnants of an electric scooter marked the spot where a top Russian general was assassinated — and signaled a potentially dangerous new phase of the war in Ukraine.
Coming just over a month before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, the bombing that killed Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov and his assistant on Tuesday was widely attributed to Ukraine, which stopped short of a formal claim of responsibility but quietly let the role of its security services be known.
Kirillov, 54, was the highest-ranking Russian military figure to die outside the battlefield since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago. With the U.S. president-elect vowing to bring a swift end to the fighting, analysts say both sides are scrambling to inflict heavy blows aimed at achieving maximum leverage in any upcoming negotiations.
“This is a new chilling stage in this war,” former Ukrainian government minister Tymofiy Mylovanov wrote on X, casting the killing as part of an apparent retaliatory campaign in which Russia has similarly targeted Ukrainian military officials.
Russian state media cited investigators as saying the early-morning blast that killed Kirillov and his assistant — an act of suspected terrorism — was triggered by an explosive device planted in a scooter parked near the entrance to an apartment building.
Ukrainian officials had made it abundantly clear they considered Kirillov a legitimate target. Only a day earlier, authorities in Kyiv lodged charges in absentia against the general, accusing him of ordering the use of banned chemical weapons in Ukraine.
The Biden administration too had linked Kirillov to Russia’s use of the chemical agent chloropicrin — a poison gas dating to the trenches of World War I — against Ukrainian troops on the front lines in the country’s south and east.
The State Department, joined at various points by Britain, Canada and New Zealand, imposed sanctions over Moscow’s alleged violation of the three-decade-old Chemical Weapons Convention.
In his capacity as chief of Russia’s radioactive, biological and chemical defense forces, the general had often publicly turned international accusations back against his accusers, claiming the Ukrainian military employed toxic agents and plotted to carry out attacks with radioactive materials. Ukraine and its backers denied those claims.
As it has at many key points in the war, Russia vowed harsh retaliation for the killing. The deputy head of the Kremlin’s Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, pledged there would be “imminent retribution” in kind against senior Ukrainian figures. Russia’s United Nations mission said it would bring the matter before the Security Council, of which it is a permanent member.
Some analysts pointed out that the killing was a likely prelude to talks in which Russia and Ukraine will each desperately seek to avoid negotiating from a position of perceived weakness.
“I think it’s a significant escalation,” analyst Ian Bremmer said of the killing, citing Kirillov’s rank and importance. In an analysis posted online for his GZERO Media, Bremmer suggested that escalatory moves by both sides in the conflict probably reflected the belief that “negotiations are coming soon.”
The killing of Kirillov was particularly audacious and high-profile but not an unprecedented attack. Last week, Moscow was also reportedly the scene of the apparent targeted killing of a top engineer of its cruise missiles, deployed with the aim of sowing havoc and death in Ukrainian cities.
Those attacks on civilian targets have increased in tempo and intensity in recent weeks, often targeting Ukraine’s power grid as cold weather tightens its grip.
On the battlefield, outnumbered and outgunned Ukrainian forces are increasingly beleaguered. In a bloody war of attrition on the eastern front, Russian forces have steadily gained ground.
In addition, a slice of Russian territory that Ukraine captured in a surprise late-summer incursion has been shrinking in size, with Russia using North Korean troops to augment the push to regain ground in the Kursk region.
Trump’s election victory in November sent tremors of dread across Ukraine, where people had closely tracked his campaign-trail commentary denigrating billions of dollars in crucial Western assistance to Kyiv.
But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky quickly turned his attention to a public relations campaign of sorts, seeking to persuade Trump that there were distinct advantages — from personal prestige to potential access to Ukraine’s mineral wealth — in avoiding capitulation to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The president-elect and Zelensky spoke this month in Paris, a meeting brokered by French President Emmanuel Macron when the U.S. and Ukrainian leaders both attended the grand reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral, which had been ravaged by fire in 2019.
Even before taking office, Trump has rattled nerves in Ukraine and among U.S. allies over the prospect of withholding crucial support.
Ukraine considered it a significant breakthrough last month when President Biden, after months of public pleas from Zelensky, reversed course and gave Ukraine the go-ahead to use U.S.-supplied long-range missiles for strikes against military targets deeper inside Russian territory. On Monday, at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort, Trump called that decision “stupid” and suggested he would reverse it.
Hours after the targeted bomb blast against Kirillov in Moscow, Zelensky, speaking remotely to the summit of a regional alliance, did not mention the general’s killing. But he cited the expectation that negotiations might come soon.
“We all understand that next year could be the year this war ends — we must make it happen,” the Ukrainian leader said. But he added: “We need to establish peace in a way that Putin can no longer break.”