By Andrew Osborn
MOSCOW (Reuters) -A Russian common assassinated by Ukraine was buried with full army honours on Friday and posthumously granted a high award, as Moscow launched an obvious revenge assault on what it mentioned was a Ukrainian intelligence service command centre in Kyiv.
Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, who was chief of Russia’s Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection Troops, is probably the most senior Russian officer to be killed inside Russia by Ukraine.
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He was killed exterior his Moscow condominium constructing on Tuesday alongside together with his assistant when a bomb hooked up to an electrical scooter went off in an assault for which Ukraine’s SBU safety service took accountability.
State information company RIA mentioned Kirillov was buried in a ceremony exterior Moscow attended by Defence Minister Andrei Belousov and Sergei Shoigu, the secretary of Russia’s Security Council.
It mentioned the ceremony had taken place at a Defence Ministry memorial complicated referred to as the Pantheon of the Defenders of the Fatherland.
Video broadcast by the Defence Ministry’s Zvezda TV channel confirmed Belousov giving Kirillov’s widow the Hero of Russia award, the nation’s high army honour, which President Vladimir Putin had determined to grant Kirillov posthumously.
Footage of the funeral confirmed an honour guard carrying a coffin draped within the nationwide flag and Kirillov’s cap on high of it as solemn music performed. A ten-man honour guard fired photographs into the air in a snow-covered cemetery after his coffin was lowered into the bottom because the nationwide anthem performed and mourners regarded on.
Among large wreaths had been two despatched by Putin and former President Dmitry Medvedev, who’s now deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council and has referred to as for the masterminds of the killing in Ukraine to be destroyed.
Russia’s Defence Ministry mentioned it had struck an SBU command centre in Kyiv in an assault which RIA mentioned had killed a number of high-ranking army and SBU members.
Reuters couldn’t affirm that report. Officials in Kyiv mentioned at the least one particular person had been killed in a missile strike on the Ukrainian capital on Friday, however Ukraine hardly ever gives particulars of strikes on army targets.
The Russian Defence Ministry didn’t instantly hyperlink the strike on the SBU command centre to Kirillov, saying it was vengeance for a Ukrainian assault on Russia’s Rostov area.
A court docket in Moscow on Thursday ordered the principle suspect in Kirillov’s killing, a local of Uzbekistan, to be despatched to pre-trial detention for 2 months after he was proven on state TV confessing to planting and detonating the bomb that killed Kirillov, 54, and his assistant.
(Reporting by Andrew Osborn, Editing by Timothy Heritage and Rod Nickel)
