The doors swing open, and two figures emerge from a nondescript building. A scooter is propped against the front wall. A man identified by Russia as Igor Kirillov, a high-ranking general, takes a few steps forward.
Then the screen, framed by the dash of a car, erupts into a flash of white.
A video that an official with Ukraine’s security service shared with The New York Times and other news outlets, recorded from the interior of a car, appears to show the moment that an explosion killed General Kirillov and an aide as they walked out onto a snowy Moscow street.
General Kirillov oversaw the Russian military’s nuclear and chemical weapons protection forces before he was assassinated on Tuesday.
An official with Ukraine’s security service, known as the S.B.U., said that Kyiv was responsible for the killing.
The Times verified that the video had been recorded from a vehicle used for short-term rentals and matched the details in the footage with the location and the time of General Kirillov’s killing.
In the last frame of the video before the explosion, the men appear to approach an idling vehicle with bright headlights.
The next frame of the video is nearly completely white.
The bomb had the force of more than two pounds of TNT, Russian state news media reported citing investigators.
The explosion that killed General Kirillov occurred at about 6:12 a.m. and was so powerful that it damaged windows as far up as the third floor of the building the men had emerged from and shattered windows across the street, the RIA Novosti state news agency reported.
As the explosion dissipates, clues to its origin emerge in the video clip. The blast’s source appears to have been near the building door, where the scooter stood, which matches a description given by Russian investigators about where the explosive was planted. The headlights of the idling vehicle are still visible.
The clip then ends abruptly.
Photographs taken of the scene show the black remnants of the blast coated against a wall that is now missing bricks. The scooter lays on its side on the ground and appears to be missing its handlebars.
Prof. Nick G. Glumac, an explosives expert and engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said an explosion of such a size could have come from around a pound of deadly high-explosive materials, detonated remotely.
“The timing is important because they could walk away from the zone of lethality very quickly,” Professor Glumac said, adding, “another 10 or 12 seconds later, they could have walked away with eardrum damage — not dead.”
The video and the imagery give a few clues about the positioning of the explosives.
“You could put the explosives in the handlebars, and it could be fairly lethal,” Professor Glumac said, adding that it would also be possible to put a deadly pack of explosives on top of the scooter.
Beyond that, he said, it would be hard to speculate on the specifics of the explosion.
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