On a Monday morning last month the Russian general Igor Kirillov left his flat in Moscow. A powerful bomb hidden in an e-scooter blew him up. Ukraine’s SBU intelligence agency said it was behind the assassination. The previous day it had charged him with war crimes: the use of banned chemical weapons that had poisoned more than 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers.
His killing was a brutal extrajudicial moment. Since Vladimir Putin’s full-scale 2022 invasion, Ukraine’s embattled government has sought justice in two ways. Its agencies have targeted perpetrators responsible for murdering Ukrainians – the commanders who give orders, technicians who design long-range missiles used in nightly attacks.
