On December 17, Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defense Troops, was killed along with an aide, by a bomb planted in a scooter outside his home in a Moscow suburb. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) claimed credit for the killing.
The next day an Uzbek man was arrested in Moscow and reportedly confessed to the crime, for which he had been promised $100,000 by Ukraine.
Since the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, Ukraine has carried out several dozen assassinations outside the combat zone, with victims including Russian military commanders in Sevastopol, political officials in the occupied Donbas, and civilian propagandists such as Daria Dugina, daughter of Aleksandr Dugin, who was killed near Moscow in 2022. Bblogger Vladlen Tatarsky was blown up in 2023 at a book launch in St. Petersburg.
Assassination is generally understood as killing by a secret or unexpected attack. In wartime, it refers to attacks outside the normal sphere of active military operations. Notre Dame law professor Mary Ellen O’Connell argues that “assassination is always unlawful,” a position that has been backed by courts such as the U.N.’s International Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights. This prohibition dates back at least to the 1907 Hague Convention, which barred “treacherously or perfidiously” killing people who were not aware that they were in imminent danger.
The 1949 Geneva convention declared that “It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy” such as “the feigning of civilian, non-combatant status.”
Despite this prohibition, many countries have resorted to assassination. Russia has been notoriously active in this regard. In August the Russians exchanged journalist Evan Gerskovich and others for a number of Russians, including Vadim Krasikov, who shot dead a Chechen separatist in Berlin in 2019, and was convicted and imprisoned for the crime by Germany.
The U.S. itself has a long history of killing foreign leaders. It officially renounced assassinations in 1976, but started up again after 9/11.
Israel has been the most prolific and proficient in carrying out what they euphemistically refer to as “targeted killings.” Ronan Bergman, in his 2018 book “Rise Up and Kill First,” argues that Israel’s reliance on assassination has been mostly counter-productive. Israeli agents often took out moderate leaders, derailing peace talks and trapping Israel to a state of endless war. Israel became very good at killing people, but forgot to ask whether it made any sense. Israel’s destruction of the leadership of Hezbollah this fall is a rare counter-example: it devastated Hezbollah’s military capacity, forcing it to retreat from south Lebanon and abandon Bashar Al-Assad to his fate.
However, Ukraine’s assassinations of Russian officials are nowhere near the scale and effectiveness of Israel’s assault on Hezbollah.
Ukraine argues that these killings will demoralize Russian society and the Russian military leadership. However, in practice they seem to have the opposite effect — they further enrage the enemy and encourage them to commit even more war crimes.
As Prince Talleyrand famously observed after Napoleon executed Louis de Bourbon in 1804: “it is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.”
Some argue that the SBU's assassination campaign is driven in part by its competition with Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence agency (GUR).
It is more likely that Ukraine is motivated by a desire for revenge, and a political concern to show that Ukraine can strike back at Russia. That means it is a sign of weakness, not strength, and is instinctual, not based on a pragmatic calculation of whether it is an effective tactic.
A salient example is the British decision to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich-Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, who was killed by two British-trained commandoes in Prague in June 1942. At that point in the war, with the Germans at the gates of Stalingrad, it looked like the Nazis were going to win. Winston Churchill was desperate to show that Britain was still in the game. Heydrich’s assassins were hunted down and killed, but the Nazis went further, wiping out the village of Lidice where the commandos were thought to have hidden.
Over 5,000 civilians were killed in the wave of retaliation. Looking back, with the benefit of hindsight, it is hard to say that the assassination served any useful purpose.
Russia is responsible for war crimes in Ukraine — with the worst being Putin’s decision to launch the invasion in the first place. But if Ukraine continues to commit acts that violate the laws of war, it undermines the legitimacy of its cause, and gives Russia additional ammunition in its propaganda war against the West — a war that it is winning in the Global South.
The tactic of targeted killing of Russian officials is unlawful and unwise. The U.S. should pressure Ukraine to stop doing it.
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