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, reported Agence France-Presse.
The 54-year-old Kirillov is the highest-ranking Russian military officer to have died 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.
"Anyone who welcomes these attacks or deliberately passes them over with silence is an accomplice", 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 from the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), which on Monday accused the general of war crimes. "This is a special operation by the SBU," this source told the French agency.