On August 19, Moscow opened a street in the Nizhny Novgorod district in the city’s southeast named after the late General Igor Kirillov. At the ceremony, his widow Svetlana Kirillova said she wanted it to become a “street of future defenders of the fatherland” and a symbol of preserving family values. The newspaper Vedomosti had previously described Svetlana Kirillova as a likely candidate for the Federation Council from Kostroma region.
A military orchestra and teenagers from Yunarmiya in beige uniforms and red berets stood nearby during the opening. Kirillov was killed in December 2024 in Moscow when an explosive device hidden in an electric scooter was detonated as he walked past it.
Kirillov headed Russia’s Radiation, Chemical and Biological Protection Forces and was one of the more visible public figures in the military leadership. After the start of the full-scale invasion, he promoted claims about alleged American biolabs in Ukraine and later spoke about a supposed Ukrainian plan to build a “dirty bomb” filled with radioactive waste.
Kirillov is one of the highest-ranking figures in the war to have a street named after him, but he is not the only one. According to data cited by the outlet Kholod in June 2024, Russia then had 153 streets named after military personnel killed during the invasion of Ukraine. Since then, the number has grown: reports about renamings and, more often, about naming new streets in developing neighborhoods appear several times a month.
Vladimir Putin has publicly urged officials at least twice to name streets after what he called the “heroes of the special military operation,” in the summer of 2023 and the spring of 2025. Although such decisions appear regularly in the news, they still make up only a small share of Russian street names overall.
According to the Federal Information Address System, Russia has 161,517 localities and 1,198,940 elements in its street and road network. Some towns and settlements already have several streets named after fallen soldiers, while others have none at all.
“We do not have such streets. There are memorial plaques on buildings and schools renamed in their honor. The decision to name or rename a street is made by the council of deputies because it is a local issue. Formally, the initiative can come from anyone, but in reality the instructions come from the regional authorities. They need it for reporting to the federal center.”