Russia held the funeral of Russian General Igor Kirillov, who was assassinated by Ukraine last Friday, coinciding with its launch of a retaliatory attack on what it described as the command center of the Ukrainian intelligence service in Kiev.

Lieutenant-General Igor Kirillov, who commanded Russia's nuclear, biological and chemical defense forces, is the highest-ranking Russian officer to be killed inside Russia by Ukraine.

Kirillov was killed outside the apartment building where he lived in Moscow last Tuesday with his assistant, when a bomb attached to an electric bicycle (scooter) exploded in an attack for which the Ukrainian intelligence service claimed responsibility.

The Russian Information Agency said that Kirillov was held at a military funeral and buried outside Moscow, in a ceremony attended by Defense Minister Andrei Belousov and Secretary of the Russian Security Council Sergei Shoigu.

The Russian Ministry of Defense said on Friday that it had struck a command center of the Ukrainian intelligence service in Kiev, in an attack that the Russian Information Agency said resulted in the killing of a number of senior military personnel and members of the Ukrainian intelligence service.

Al-Ain News was unable to confirm the authenticity of the Russian story.

Officials in Kiev said that at least one person was killed in a missile attack on the Ukrainian capital on Friday, but Ukraine rarely provides details about strikes on military targets.

The Russian Ministry of Defense did not directly link the strike on the command center of the Ukrainian intelligence service to the assassination of Kirillov, and said that it was retaliation for a Ukrainian attack on the Russian Rostov region.

On Thursday, a court in Moscow ruled that the main suspect in Kirillov's killing, who is of Uzbek origin, be held in pretrial detention for two months after he appeared on state television confessing to planting and detonating the bomb that killed Kirillov (54 years old) and his assistant.

Ukrainian security services claimed responsibility for the assassination of the Russian general.

A Ukrainian security source told AFP that “today’s bomb attack on Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, commander of the radiological, chemical and biological defense forces of the Russian Armed Forces, is a special operation of the Ukrainian security service.”