20 generals of Putin’s forces have died in the conflict with kyiv, according to unofficial figures

▲ In an image from February last year, General Igor Kirilov, head of the radiological, chemical and biological defense troops of the Russian army, murdered early yesterday morning while leaving his residence in Moscow.Photo Ap

Juan Pablo Duch

Correspondent

La Jornada Newspaper
Wednesday, December 18, 2024, p. 21

Moscow. Ukraine’s intelligence service, anonymous sources told international news agencies, assassinated General Igor Kirilov and his assistant early yesterday in the Russian capital, by remotely detonating a bomb placed on a left electric scooter. next to the entrance of the building where he lived.

The day before (Monday), as head of the radiological, chemical and biological defense troops of the Russian army since 2017, Kirilov attended the meeting of the army leadership with President Vladimir Putin.

He is the highest-ranking Russian soldier killed in the rear during the almost three years that the special military operationalthough the independent press, based on open sources, has named at least nine Russian generals who perished during this period.

Unofficially, there is talk of about 20 Russian army generals killed in this war, a figure much higher than the three Soviet generals who lost their lives during the 10 years that the invasion of Afghanistan lasted, two of them due to illness and the last, in a traffic accident.

Furthermore, in less than a week, Mikhail Shatsky, famous designer of Russian cruise missiles, fell dead next to his home, on the outskirts of Moscow, as a victim of presumably Ukrainian gunmen.

54 years old, the person who died yesterday, say those familiar with the military hierarchy, was part of the second level of importance in the Ministry of Defense, immediately below only the first circle of maximum confidence of the head of the portfolio, Andrei Belousov, who are the vice ministers.

Kirilov gained media notoriety by becoming the voice of Russia who, relatively frequently, appeared at special press conferences to accuse the United States of installing laboratories in Ukraine with no other purpose than to design chemical and biological weapons, although the United Nations Organization (UN) is still waiting for the presentation of the evidence of these serious accusations.

At the time, Kirilov explained that the United States was testing in its laboratories in Ukraine to create mosquitoes, bats and migratory birds to be launched in special drones with the mission of spreading epidemics such as yellow fever, dengue and Zika.

Those biological weaponsIn addition, they would have to distinguish ethnic groups by their body odor and attack only the Slavs (supposedly Russians, although Ukrainians are also Russians). That condemning resolution, which Russia even submitted for consideration to the UN Security Council, had its vote and that of China.

For the Kremlin, Kirilov was a hero of Russia and, not in vain, he proudly wore the honorable decoration in all his official portraits; For Ukraine, the general was a absolutely legitimate objective as war criminal and thus he was judged the day before in a kyiv court, which concluded that the troops he commanded usually use banned chemical weapons.

Independent analysts believe that Russia is resorting to grenades with irritant gases in combat, which are not lethal and, therefore, strictly speaking, are not proscribed in international conventions.

He worked without fear

The spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zajarova, highlighted on her social networks that Kirilov For many years and systematically, he worked fearlessly and exposed, with facts in hand, the crimes of the Anglo-Saxons.before attributing to the United States chemical weapons attacks in Syria wave provocation that Russia tried to assassinate former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter with the Novichok substance in Great Britain.

The vice president of the Russian Senate, Konstantin Kosachov, described Kirilov’s death as irreparable loss and remembered that We work closely in the parliamentary commission investigating the activity of US biological laboratories in Ukraine.

Sources close to critical sectors of the Russian Army General Staff, such as the Rybar channel on the Telegram network, warn: The murder of the head of the radiological, chemical and biological defense troops in Moscow demonstrates, once again, that regardless of the successes we have on the battlefields, the euphoria that reigns and what we can say about who has the initiative (in war), the other side (Ukraine) will always have the possibility to deal very painful blows.