The Kirillov assassination has hurt the Russian elite's sense of immunity
The war is coming home to Moscow – in graphic form. Even in a country that circumscribes information about the bloody conflict in Ukraine, shock is immense. Dignified state TV pictures ofin uniform and a cordoned-off building have been superseded by social media images of a bleeding body in the snow and detritus of a massive explosion which killed the man who headed Russia’s Nuclear, Biological, Chemical Defence Forces .
But even a secretive system is struggling to conceal the humiliation of assassinations both of a key figure in the country’s missile programme, and a brigadier commanding Russia’s missile ships in the Black Sea . To the objection that this is an escalation, the Ukrainian position is unapologetic: if Russia can bring war to Ukrainian cities, then Kyiv can do the same to its bigger neighbour.
A wider target of this attack is the sense of immunity from consequences felt by military and industrial elites, who enable the war because they have believed that it can end on their master’s terms. Western advisers have argued that targeting collaborators and propagandists in the occupied territories and messy sagas such as the murder of Daria Dugina, the daughter of an extreme Russian nationalist , have risked overdoing the extra-judicial part. There is also concern about the targeting of Russia loyalists who made no great difference, alive or dead, to the war and whose deaths felt more like retributive justice than grand strategy.
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