The US "was not informed in advance", "we do not support" such operations, said State Department spokesman Matthew Miller, after Russian General Igor Kirillov was killed in an explosion in Moscow, and Kiev claimed responsibility for the attack, Agence France-Presse reported, BTA reported.
54-year-old Kirillov is the highest-ranking Russian military officer to die since the start of the offensive against Ukraine. In October, he was sanctioned by London for the alleged use of chemical weapons in Ukraine, AFP recalls.
"All those who welcome these attacks or deliberately ignore them are accomplices", said Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. She accused Kiev's allies of "approving war crimes".
The head of the Russian radiation, chemical and biological defense forces and his assistant were killed in a terrorist attack. This is "a continuation and development of the spiral of Western approval of the war crimes of the Kiev regime's fighters, which they have been spinning all these years", she stressed, quoted by TASS.
AFP noted that the murder of Igor Kirillov in the Russian capital was reported shortly after by a source in the Ukrainian security services (SBU), which on Monday accused the general of war crimes. "This is a special operation by the SBU", this source told the French agency.