As Sarajevo in 1914 showed, assassinations can trigger wars. But does the targeted killing of senior opponents ever bring a running conflict closer to its end?
In the past week, Ukrainian agents have killed a key Russian missile designer, Mikhail Shatsky, as well as Putin’s chemical weapons chief, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov. The former was eliminated on the edge of Moscow; the latter was targeted in the residential heart of the capital itself, using a device hidden in a parked scooter that was detonated remotely.
The Russian Army may be grinding forward in eastern Ukraine – but, far from the frontlines, Ukraine is keen to show it is a menace to Putin’s ambitions. Ukraine drone operators, for instance, played a key role in toppling Bashar al-Assad, Putin’s ally in Syria.
Assassination, as the deeply held conventional wisdom has it, is a “weapon of the weak”. But it also has symbolic value – especially when it strikes at an apparently super strongman.
In 1942, British intelligence parachuted Czech and Slovak agents into their Nazi-occupied homeland to kill Reinhard Heydrich – key architect of the Final Solution and the sophisticated manager that earned him nickname “the Butcher of Prague” – to maximise arms outputs for Hitler’s war effort.
Killing Heydrich was a severe blow to the Nazi leaders’ arrogant sense of impunity. But it did not stop the machinery of mass murder rolling for a minute, and led to ferocious reprisals.
Taking out a man at near the pinnacle of power might force a policy rethink, but even senior officials are replaceable. However, by showing that such senior officers are personally vulnerable can be a blow to a regime’s prestige with an even greater effect on enemy morale.
The fact that Russian spokesmen have blamed the “Anglo-Saxons” for Lt Gen Kirillov’s assassination, outside an apartment building in the Russian capital, is a sign that the Kremlin does not want to let Ukraine take the full credit for his killing. Much better to blame James Bond than accept that the despised Ukrainian enemy can strike in Moscow itself.
Ukraine’s ability to locate key Russian targets and strike them on Putin’s own doorstep shows it has a network of agents able to operate within Russia. For the president, a former head of Russia’s internal security service, the FSB, this is a severe blow to his personal prestige.
So long as his war against Ukraine was taking place somewhere “over there”, away from everyday life, domestic public support has appeared strong. Most of the Russian casualties in Putin’s war have come from more remote, rural regions than the capital itself.
But the Ukrainian boast – that their military intelligence, GUR, is better at taking out opponents than Russia’s GRU – hurts Kremlin pride.
The ruthlessness of this Russo-Ukrainian war has been getting worse of late, but it is the immanence of the change of presidents in the United States that has made matters acute. Donald Trump wants to be seen as the global arbiter in the run-up to his inauguration. Vladimir Putin had hoped to shape the battlefield to his advantage before Trump was back in the White House. Volodymyr Zelensky wants to remind the world that Ukraine is fighting back.
The cruel irony is that, if peace talks are on the horizon, the violence is likely to soar. Both the Kremlin and Kyiv are manoeuvring into positions of greatest strength before entering Trump-sponsored talks.
Before the signing of a peace deal at Camp David, we can expect a cruel mix of Russian bludgeoning and Ukrainian targeted killings. What could go wrong?
Mark Almond is director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford