On the night of December 16, 2024, the snow had stopped falling in Moscow and had blanketed the sidewalks, even in the city’s upscale neighborhoods where high-ranking Russian officials resided.

When Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, head of the Russian Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Protection Troops, stepped out of the entrance of his apartment building on Ryazansky Avenue in central Moscow along with his aide, he paid no attention to the small electric scooter that had been left just a breath away from his car.

He barely managed to take a single step when a powerful explosion killed him instantly, along with his aide. A few hours later, a video showing his final moments was released to the public. It was leaked by the SBU, the Security Service of Ukraine, which had just the day before accused Kirillov of war crimes, publishing a photo of him with the word “suspect” written in red letters.

What very few knew was that the SBU had already decided to execute him, knowing that the married general with two sons had ordered the mass use of banned chemical weapons on the battlefield. The result was that 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers ended up in hospitals and other medical facilities, suffering from varying degrees of chemical poisoning.

Strikes in the Heart of Moscow

Kirillov’s execution caused major turmoil in the Kremlin and shook the leadership of the FSB and GRU, Russia’s two intelligence agencies, which are tasked with preventing such operations.

It was later revealed that the abandoned scooter was loaded with explosives, which were allegedly detonated remotely by an SBU agent, most likely from inside a nearby vehicle.

According to The Guardian, it was a precision strike by the Ukrainian Security Service, and until the drone attacks on five Russian military bases the previous Sunday, it had been considered the most spectacular one.

It was not the only one, however. Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the SBU has launched a series of operations against targets it considers enemies. It began in August 2022, when it blew up a car driven by Darya Dugina, daughter of the ultranationalist Alexander Dugin, an ally of Putin.

The following April, it was the turn of Vladlen Tatarsky, a prominent pro-war Russian military blogger who regularly had coffee at a specific café in St. Petersburg. SBU agents had rigged a golden statue with a bomb, which instantly killed Vladlen. Then, in December 2023, an unknown assailant shot former Ukrainian MP Ilya Kiva.

Kiva had defected to Moscow shortly before the war began and frequently appeared on Russian state TV, harshly criticizing his homeland’s government. He was walking unsuspectingly through a park in the upscale suburb of Odintsovo when a man approached and executed him with a handgun. His body was discovered several hours later.

Strategic Shift

In Ukraine, playing on the initials of the SBU, people call it “The Service of God”, an agency that has achieved deep penetration inside Russia — a fact highlighted by Operation “Spiderweb.”

Over the past two years, the Ukrainian Security Service appears to have shifted its strategy. After Kiva’s execution, it began targeting individuals directly involved in the war effort. “We decided to go after the specialists,” an SBU official anonymously told The Guardian last year after Kirillov’s assassination.

This escalation in target value led to operations like the attacks on the Crimean bridge and the bold drone raid involving 117 drones on five military bases on June 1st of this year.

These highly classified missions could not have been carried out without the collaboration of recruited Russians opposed to the war, as well as SBU agents who have long been embedded in Russia, living like ordinary people until the moment of action arrives.

When the order comes from the Sluzhba Bezpeky Ukrainy, the right people undertake dramatic operations like “Spiderweb” or dispense their own brutal extrajudicial justice to Russian generals with booby-trapped scooters.