An Uzbek man is charged in Moscow with killing a Russian general in a bombing claimed by Ukraine

An Uzbek citizen accused of acting on behalf of Ukraine has been charged by Russian authorities with this week's assassination of a senior Russian general and his assistant in a bombing claimed by Ukraine's security services, state media said Thursday.

Akhmadzhon Kurbonov was ordered detained by a Moscow court until at least Feb. 17 in Tuesday's bombing that killed Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the chief of Russia’s Radiation, Biological and Chemical Protection Forces, the Tass state news agency reported.

Kurbonov was charged with the killings, carrying out a terrorist act and illegally manufacturing explosives, the Russian news agency said.

Kirillov was killed by a bomb hidden on an electric scooter outside his apartment building in Moscow, a day after Ukraine’s security service leveled criminal charges against him. His assistant, Ilya Polikarpov, also was killed.

Kurbonov — previously referred to by news agencies as Akhmad Kurbanov — was detained by Russian security services on Wednesday.

Shortly after he was detained, Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, which did not identify him, said he was born in 1995 and was recruited by Ukraine’s security service. The Associated Press could not confirm the conditions under which the suspect spoke to the FSB.

The suspect said he had been promised $100,000 and resettlement in a European Union country in exchange for killing Kirillov, according to the FSB.

The agency said that acting on instructions from Ukraine, the suspect picked up a homemade bomb in Moscow, placed it on an e-scooter and parked it at the entrance to Kirillov’s apartment building.

He rented a car to monitor the location and set up a camera that livestreamed the scene to his handlers in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, the FSB said, detonating the bomb when Kirillov left the building.

Kirillov, 54, was the head of Russia’s Radiation, Biological and Chemical Protection Forces. The special troops are tasked with protecting the military from use of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons and ensuring operations in a contaminated environment.

Kirillov was under sanctions from several countries, including the United Kingdom and Canada, for his actions in Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. On Monday, Ukraine’s Security Service, or SBU, opened a criminal investigation against him, accusing him of directing the use of banned chemical weapons.

Russia denies using any chemical weapons in Ukraine and has accused Kyiv of using toxic agents in combat.

An SBU official told the AP on Tuesday that the agency was behind the attack. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information, described Kirillov as a “war criminal and an entirely legitimate target.”

CORRECTS NAME TO AKHMADZHON KURBONOV - The man, whom Tass and RIA-Novosti news agencies identified as Akhmadzhon Kurbonov, suspected of involvement in the killing of Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia's Radiation, Biological and Chemical Defense Forces, and his assistant Ilya Polikarpov, sits in a cage in a courtroom at the Basmanny District Court in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Pavel Bednyakov)

CORRECTS NAME TO AKHMADZHON KURBONOV - The man, whom Tass and RIA-Novosti news agencies identified as Akhmadzhon Kurbonov, suspected of involvement in the killing of Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia's Radiation, Biological and Chemical Defense Forces, and his assistant Ilya Polikarpov, sits in a cage in a courtroom at the Basmanny District Court in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Pavel Bednyakov)

CORRECTS NAME TO AKHMADZHON KURBONOV - The man, whom Tass and RIA-Novosti news agencies identified as Akhmadzhon Kurbonov, suspected of involvement in the killing of Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia's Radiation, Biological and Chemical Defense Forces, and his assistant Ilya Polikarpov, is escorted to a courtroom at the Basmanny District Court in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Pavel Bednyakov)

CORRECTS NAME TO AKHMADZHON KURBONOV - The man, whom Tass and RIA-Novosti news agencies identified as Akhmadzhon Kurbonov, suspected of involvement in the killing of Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia's Radiation, Biological and Chemical Defense Forces, and his assistant Ilya Polikarpov, sits in a cage in a courtroom at the Basmanny District Court in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Pavel Bednyakov)

CORRECTS NAME TO AKHMADZHON KURBONOV - The man, whom Tass and RIA-Novosti news agencies identified as Akhmadzhon Kurbonov, suspected of involvement in the killing of Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia's Radiation, Biological and Chemical Defense Forces, and his assistant Ilya Polikarpov, is escorted to a courtroom at the Basmanny District Court in Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Pavel Bednyakov)

Immigration in 2024 drove U.S. population growth to its fastest rate in 23 years as the nation surpassed 340 million residents, the U.S. Census Bureau said Thursday.

The almost 1% growth rate this year was the highest it has been since 2001, and it was a marked contrast to the record low of 0.2% set in 2021 at the height of pandemic restrictions on travel to the United States, according to the annual population estimates.

Immigration this year increased by almost 2.8 million people, partly because of a new method of counting that adds people who were admitted for humanitarian reasons. Net international migration accounted for 84% of the nation’s 3.3 million-person increase between 2023 and 2024.

Births outnumbered deaths in the United States by almost 519,000 between 2023 and 2024, which was an improvement over the historic low of 146,000 in 2021 but still well below the highs of previous decades.

Immigration had a meaningful impact not only nationally but also for individual states, accounting for all of the growth in 16 states that otherwise would have lost population from residents moving out-of-state or from deaths outpacing births, William Frey, a demographer at The Brookings Institution, said in an email.

“While some of the surge may be attributed to border crossings of asylees and humanitarian migrants in an unusual year, these numbers also show how immigration can be an important contributor to population gains in a large swath of the nation that would otherwise be experiencing slow growth or declines,” Frey said.

As it has been throughout the 2020s, the South was the fastest growing region in the United States in 2024, adding more new residents — 1.8 million people — than all the other regions combined. Texas added the most people at 562,941 new residents, followed by Florida with an additional 467,347 new residents. The District of Columbia had the nation's fastest growth rate at 2.2%.

Three states — Mississippi, Vermont and West Virginia — lost population this year, though by tiny amounts ranging from 127 to 516 people.

In 2024, there was an easing up in the number of people moving out of coastal urban states like California and New York and into the Sunbelt growth powerhouses like Florida and Texas compared with the peak pandemic years, Frey said.

In fact, both California and New York added people in 2024 after declines this decade, growing by 232,570 people and 129,881 people, respectively, primarily because of immigration.

Still, the large number of people moving South this decade has caused the U.S. population center to turn sharply south after drifting southwesterly for several decades in “a demographic shock to the evolving settlement pattern of the United States,” said Alex Zakrewsky, an urban planner in New Jersey who calculates the population center each year.

The number of children in the United States dropped from 73.3 million in 2023 to 73.1 million in 2024.

The group of people being included in the international migration estimates are those who enter the country through humanitarian parole, which has been granted for seven decades by Republican and Democratic presidential administrations to people unable to use standard immigration routes because of time pressure or their government’s poor relations with the U.S. The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based research organization, said last week that more than 5.8 million people were admitted under various humanitarian policies from 2021 to 2024.

Capturing the number of new immigrants is the most difficult part of the annual U.S. population estimates. Although the newly announced change in methodology is unrelated, the timing comes a month before a return to the White House of President-elect Donald Trump, who has promised mass deportations of people in the United States illegally.

The bureau’s annual calculation of how many migrants entered the United States in the 2020s has been much lower than the numbers cited by other federal agencies, such as the Congressional Budget Office. The Census Bureau estimated 1.1 million immigrants entered the United States in 2023, while the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate was 3.3 million people. With the revised method, last year's immigration figures are now recalculated by the Census Bureau at almost 2.3 million people, or an additional 1.1 million people.

Because the Census Bureau survey used to estimate foreign-born immigration only captured people living in households with addresses, it overlooked large numbers of immigrants who had come for humanitarian reasons this decade since it often takes them a few years to get a stable home, said Jennifer Van Hook, a Penn State demographer who worked on the change at the bureau.

“What has happened over time is that immigration has changed,” Van Hook said. “You have numbers of people coming in who are claiming asylum and being processed at the U.S.-Mexico border from across the globe.”

Follow Mike Schneider on the social platform X: @MikeSchneiderAP.

FILE - New United States citizens wave American flags during a naturalization ceremony during halftime at an NFL football game between the Jacksonville Jaguars and the New York Jets, Dec. 15, 2024, in Jacksonville, Fla. (AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack, File)