The war is coming home to Moscow – in graphic form. Even in a country that circumscribes information about the bloody conflict in Ukraine, shock is immense. Dignified state TV pictures of Igor Kirillov in uniform and a cordoned-off building have been superseded by social media images of a bleeding body in the snow and detritus of a massive explosion which killed the man who headed Russia’s Nuclear, Biological, Chemical Defence Forces (and his assistant). The title is a blunt misnomer – Kirillov was an aggressor, not a defender, in the use of chemical weapons in Ukraine.
It is the latest in a slew of killings of senior Russian officials carried out by Kyiv’s ruthless SBU state security service – and this time no doubt has been left about the reasoning: Ukraine declared Kirillov a war criminal just the day before the fatal attack.
For President Zelensky’s strategists, the bigger prize than Kirillov himself is bringing retribution to a prosperous part of the Russian capital, a suburb of apartment blocks inhabited by senior figures in the state apparatus.
The bargain that the Kremlin has struck with Russia’s population to justify a growing state of oppression is that Putin is the sole guarantor of their safety – literally “bezopasnost” or “absence of danger” is a phrase deployed receptively by the propaganda machine.
But even a secretive system is struggling to conceal the humiliation of assassinations both of a key figure in the country’s missile programme, and a brigadier commanding Russia’s missile ships in the Black Sea (the latter, Valery Trankovsky, was killed last month in a Crimea car bombing). To the objection that this is an escalation, the Ukrainian position is unapologetic: if Russia can bring war to Ukrainian cities, then Kyiv can do the same to its bigger neighbour.
At the same time, Ukraine wants to change the focus away from losses and weaknesses on its front line to a narrative which will hearten a population tiring of conscription, as hostilities have dragged on and the prospect of all-out territorial liberation recedes.
Ukraine’s conventional forces are in a weakened state. But the country is forcing domestic Russian attention to the consequences of the conflict and in so doing, it hopes to weaken Putin’s iron grip on the military machine and intensify doubts about the management of the war known to exist among the much-reshuffled top brass.
A wider target of this attack is the sense of immunity from consequences felt by military and industrial elites, who enable the war because they have (so far) believed that it can end on their master’s terms.
It is a message aimed at senior figures in military, nuclear and defence-industrial circles close to Putin: they too may end up as a chalk drawing on a splattered pavement on an unlucky day.
In truth, the scope of the SBU’s attacks on Russia have divided opinion and at times caused concern among Western allies, including the US and UK intelligence services who offer advice, but who cannot control the precise outcome of what Ukrainian colleagues undertake.
Extra-judicial killings, like that of the Wagner group leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, on Putin’s orders in 2023, have roots in the unscrupulous days of the Ukrainian version of the KGB – trained in the same tactics as their former Soviet allies.
Western advisers have argued that targeting collaborators and propagandists in the occupied territories and messy sagas such as the murder of Daria Dugina, the daughter of an extreme Russian nationalist (largely attributed to a Ukraine-backed operation), have risked overdoing the extra-judicial part. There is also concern about the targeting of Russia loyalists who made no great difference, alive or dead, to the war and whose deaths felt more like retributive justice than grand strategy.
Kirillov, however, was a large cog in the war machine who had ordered mass killings in Ukraine using weapons outside every international agreement. The timing is also critical as the countdown to Donald Trump becoming president proceeds and Ukraine is forced to the negotiating table as a new US administration withdraws the level of weapons support Kyiv eked out of Joe Biden.
It is no longer in a position to recover much, if any, of its lost territory and, as one British security source told me, “there has been and is a real risk that its front line could fall”.
The Moscow killings will also unleash ferocious missile attacks on civilians and infrastructure, deepening winter misery in a war-torn but defiant country. In these circumstances, the aim is to show as much fighting spirit as possible.
Very soon, though, it will confront a US president who has deemed his predecessor’s last-minute approval of Kyiv’s use of long-range missiles to attack Russia “stupid” and intends to force a settlement. That will come as good news to the man who owns this war – Vladimir Putin.
Yet events this were a reminder that however the maps are re-drawn, weapons stocks diluted and defence pacts wrangled over, Russia will continue to reap the whirlwind of the war it started – and that the price is paid at home.
Anne McElvoy is former Moscow bureau chief and host of POLITICO’s Power Play podcast
