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Killing of Russian General Sends a Message, but Doesn’t Change the War
Ukraine’s forces are steadily losing ground on the battlefield. The assassination of a top general in Moscow won’t improve their war effort, analysts and Western officials say.
Michael Schwirtz has been a correspondent in both Moscow and Ukraine, mostly recently covering the Ukraine war.
Ukraine’s brazen assassination of a Russian general on a Moscow street this week was a triumph for Ukraine’s intelligence services, showcasing a decade’s worth of investment in developing the skills, technology and ingenuity needed to operate successfully behind enemy lines in wartime.
But it was a limited triumph.
Killing the general, Igor Kirillov, 54, will no doubt enrage the Kremlin and spread a degree of fear among the country’s military and political elites, military experts said. It also eliminates a top military leader, who, according to Ukrainian officials, had ordered the use of banned chemical substances against Ukrainian troops.
What it will not do, according to Western officials and experts, is improve Kyiv’s position in its war with Russia. On the battlefield, Ukraine’s forces continue to steadily lose ground to their larger and better-equipped adversaries. On Tuesday, Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, the commander of Ukrainian forces, said active fighting was occurring along more than 700 miles of the front line, including major Russian offensive operations in several regions.
“I think there’s a psychological impact that suggests to the elites that we can find you wherever you are and you’re not safe,” said Douglas London, who served as a C.I.A. station chief three times before retiring in 2019, referring to the assassination. “I don’t think it’s really going to have an effect on their war fighting capability.”
On the battlefield, the situation has not looked this desperate for Ukrainian troops since the start of the invasion. Russian forces have moved into the outskirts of Pokrovsk, an important rail hub, and are threatening the major cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, all in the eastern Donetsk region. Things are so dire there that officials have ordered the evacuation of more than 300,000 residents still living in the region.
Meanwhile, Russian forces, augmented with fighters from North Korea, have launched a counteroffensive aiming at pushing the Ukrainians out of their foothold in Russia’s Kursk region, where they have occupied a significant patch of land since the summer. (Some North Korean soldiers have died in the fighting, American military officials have suggested.)
Given Ukraine’s struggles on the battlefield, assassinations and other covert operations like sabotage might be among the few useful tools in Ukraine’s arsenal, Western officials and experts said. They are skills that the Ukrainians have been honing for years.
Before President Vladimir V. Putin launched the full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine and Russia engaged in a shadow war of tit-for-tat assassinations. Political and military leaders as well as intelligence commanders were blown up in car bombings or in more creative ways. In one famous case, Ukrainian operatives connected a remote trigger to a shoulder-fired rocket launcher aimed at the office of a Russian-backed rebel commander and killed him when he entered.
The bomb that killed General Kirillov showed a similar level of ingenuity. It was attached to a scooter placed next to a residential building and detonated, apparently by remote control, when the general exited the building early Tuesday morning, killing him and his aide. A camera set up in a car parked across the street apparently provided a video feed that allowed Ukrainian operators to observe the scene and know when the general was emerging.
Though there have been a number of assassinations in Russia since the war began, never has such a high-ranking military leader been killed so far from the battlefield. Ukraine’s domestic intelligence service, the SBU, claimed responsibility for the operation. The same agency was behind the remote-triggered rocket launcher attack, as well as other sabotage operations and targeted killings.
For Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, Tuesday’s assassination was the culmination of work he began as commander of the SBU starting in 2014. Under his leadership, the agency began to purge officers thought to have Russian sympathies and bring in young officers born after Ukraine gained its independence from Moscow in 1991.
Mr. Nalyvaichenko, together with his longtime aide, Gen. Valeriy Kondratiuk, created a new paramilitary unit known as the Fifth Directorate, that would eventually receive training from the C.I.A. to conduct covert operations behind enemy lines. Though American officials say they never intended such training to be employed in assassinations, the Fifth Directorate took a lead role in specifically those types of operations.
“We’ve spent a lot of resources and time,” Mr. Nalyvaichenko said in an interview. “I’m glad that it’s working and that all these efforts are starting to bring results.”
Russian officials vowed to avenge General Kirillov’s death. Dmitri Medvedev, a former president and currently the deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, pledged “inevitable retaliation” against the “military and political leadership of Ukraine.”
Mr. Nalyvaichenko, who is now a member of the Ukrainian parliament, urged military and civilian leaders to be vigilant, but he and others said that the Russian security services appeared less capable of carrying out such operations on Ukrainian soil than they had been in the past.
Both the SBU and its sister service, the military intelligence agency, or HUR, have been linked to a number of assassinations on Russian soil and Russian occupied territory in Ukraine. U.S. officials believe Ukraine’s security services were behind the 2022 killing of Daria Dugina, the daughter of a prominent Russian nationalist. And last month the S.B.U. claimed responsibility for the assassination of Valery Trankovsky, a senior Russian naval officer, who Ukraine said had ordered missile strikes at civilian targets. Both were killed in car bombings.
In each case, Russian officials have vowed retaliation. But Russia’s intelligence services have so far failed to match the success of their Ukrainian counterparts. Ukrainian officials claimed to have thwarted plots against the life of President Volodymyr Zelensky early in the war, in at least one case with the help of the C.I.A. In an interview with an Italian television channel earlier this year, Mr. Zelensky said his security services had told him of 10 such plots.
Experts and intelligence officials credited Ukrainian counterintelligence for thwarting such plots, but said Russia was also less reliant — intentionally so — on covert operations than Ukraine. Unlike Ukraine, Russia can fire long-range missiles that can hit anywhere, and were likely using their operatives for intelligence gathering and weapons targeting, rather than assassinations, said Ralph Goff, a former senior C.I.A. official, who stills travels frequently to Ukraine.
For the Ukrainians, carrying out assassinations, he said, “is a strategy of necessity because it’s all they got.”
Still, the question lingers of whether such operations matter. Ukraine’s American supporters have long warned that assassinations of this kind might provide a quick jolt of satisfaction, but in the end are provocative, counterproductive and a waste of limited resources.
“The Ukrainians see an opportunity here,” Mr. Goff said. “They’re trying to turn the heat up on the Russian elites to force Putin to make a deal. I think it’s a flawed strategy. If they’re not careful they’ll create the opposite effect. They anger the Russians so much that they say we’re not interested in negotiating.”
The Biden administration has tried to use Ukraine’s dependence on American aid as leverage to curtail such operations, American officials have said, with obviously limited success. Should the Trump administration significantly cut back America’s assistance, Ukraine’s intelligence services may feel even less restraint, and see such actions as one of the few ways of continuing the war and inflicting harm on Russia, Mr. London said.
“With the Trump administration coming in the Ukrainians are looking at how they can more effectively leverage asymmetrical operations, both assassination operations like they’ve been doing as well as long-distance strikes using their own homegrown developed drones and missiles,” he said.
Even inside Ukraine, though, some question the wisdom of such operations.
A senior Ukrainian special forces officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity to provide a candid assessment, said they have “zero” impact strategically and tactically.
They will find a replacement for that general, the officer said, predicting that as a condition of any peace settlement Russia would insist not only on a cessation of military operations, but also of secret operations that kill their generals.
Michael Schwirtz is an investigative reporter with the International desk. With The Times since 2006, he previously covered the countries of the former Soviet Union from Moscow and was a lead reporter on a team that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for articles about Russian intelligence operations. More about Michael Schwirtz
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