Assassins often imagine themselves as the deliverers of justice, the right hand of a deity firing lightning bolts to strike down the guilty.
More often, human error dogs their efforts — a failed machine gun in the case of the SS mass murderer Reinhard Heydrich, a failure of nerve among several of Archduke Ferdinand’s killers, and a failure of applied chemistry for Russian would-be assassins of Sergei Skripal, Alexey Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza.
Even when successful, the plots bring mixed results. Heydrich, surely the poster boy for justified killing, did die at the hands of British-enabled Czechoslovak paratroopers in 1942. But the reprisals included the murder of about 2,000 people, including the leveling of the villages of Lidice and Ležáky. Ferdinand’s death caused World War I, while the Skripal poisoning provoked the biggest Western clear-out of Russian spies for decades.
It’s tempting, of course.
“I could pick the bastard off from here as easy as winking,” the British military attaché in Berlin mused as he watched a reviewing stand being erected for Hitler in 1938. “And what’s more, I’m thinking of doing it.”
The reason his government declined the offer is not simply that the consequences are often greater than the gains; it’s that the consequences are unknowable.
The wisdom and effects of assassination are more than a historical debate; state-organized assassination is on the rise, as Israel’s mass targeted killings of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards has shown.
Ukraine too has been working on this for a while, and is becoming steadily more deadly. As the Israeli example illustrates, targeted killings start small (Israel’s first were in 1956 and included the “Wrath of God” campaign against the 1972 Olympics terrorists) and tend to get bigger. Once such programs are underway, they’re very hard to stop. The risks in Ukraine may be even greater, especially if an unjust peace is forced on it. There are now many experienced and well-armed covert operatives who would plausibly continue the fight in such circumstances.
So the assassination of Lt Gen Igor Kirillov, the 54-year-old head of Russia’s radioactive, chemical, and biological unit by the Ukrainian intelligence service in Moscow on December 17, is worth noting.
He was accused of 4,800 chemical weapons attacks against Ukrainian personnel and was a leading mouthpiece for state propaganda. His death from an exploding scooter removed a clearly odious individual.
Ukraine feels that the assassination game pays dividends. And it does come with some obvious benefits — killing a three star general in the heart of the enemy capital demonstrates an impressive reach and an organizational capacity that sends shivers through Vladimir Putin’s despotic state. The agency involved, the SBU, gains prestige from the killing, and no doubt some bragging rights with its military intelligence counterpart, the HUR of Lt Gen Kyrylo Budanov, which has launched numerous audacious attacks inside Russia.
And of course, Ukraine has more than enough justification to respond; it has long been the main target of Putin’s lavishly funded espio-state. Ukrainian agents arrested two colonels in President Zelenskyy’s guard detail in May, accusing them of a plot to kill him. There have been many other such schemes against Zelenskyy. HUR says Budanov has been the target of 10 Russian assassination attempts.
Putin’s men have good reason to fear Ukrainian intelligence agencies run by ruthless men with a profound understanding of their language, culture, and geography.
Yet this has made the US and some European allies deeply nervous. The killing of the extreme nationalist Daria Dugina, daughter of the fanatical Aleksandr Dugin, in August 2022, provoked US security officials to share their fears with the New York Times. “Some American officials believe it is crucial to curb what they see as dangerous adventurism, particularly political assassinations,” the article said, reporting that the US had formally rapped Ukraine over the knuckles for the killing. They feared retaliation.
And that’s the worry. With the war nearly three-years-old and with many hundreds of thousands dead and wounded, the restraint among senior figures may be loosening. Ukraine takes its own risks of course, but with Russian sabotage efforts now expanding across the continent, there must be a fear that others will be drawn into the brawl.
This is far from unlikely — the Russian plot to murder the chief executive of German arms maker Rheinmetall and other senior figures in Europe’s defense industries was only foiled because of US counter-intelligence efforts.
We must assume there will be more such efforts from Russian intelligence. And that some will be successful.
Perhaps that is unavoidable — many Ukrainians would certainly make that argument. But the risk remains that authoritarian states with their enormous security forces are better equipped and far more willing to do things that democracies fear even to consider.
Francis Harris is Managing Editor at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and oversees Europe’s Edge. He was a foreign correspondent with the Daily Telegraph and served in Prague, London, New York, and Washington.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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