Personal payback: Assassinations escalate in Ukraine and Russia’s shadow war

On 30 August, in Lviv, an assassin disguised as a courier shot dead Andriy Parubiy, a serving member of Ukraine’s Parliament and its former speaker. A prominent nationalist, Parubiy was also one of the leaders of the pro-European demonstrations in 2013 and 2014 that toppled Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, which Russia used as a pretext to seize the Crimean peninsula and set in motion the initially covert and now all-out invasions of Ukraine. According to law enforcement agencies, the suspected killer’s Russian handlers promised him assistance in retrieving the body of his son, who went missing while fighting Russians in eastern Ukraine.¹ 

The assassination of Parubiy is among the latest incidents in a shadow war running alongside the battles and long-range strikes since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. Analysis of over 150 assassination attempts (see map below), including foiled ones, in both Ukraine and Russia, illustrates how Ukraine has exacted personal costs on those involved in the war, particularly occupation officials and, more recently, senior military officers. Russia, too, has increasingly looked to replicate the practice. Unrestricted by the confines of the battlefield, these assassinations have the potential to outlast the conventional war, as those responsible for waging it are unlikely to be held accountable through legal action.

The price of occupying Ukraine: Assassinations in Russia-occupied parts of Ukraine escalate

Assassinations in Ukraine precede Russia’s overt invasion of the country. Ukrainian special services have targeted Russia-backed insurgents in Ukraine’s Donbas since 2014, including the Donetsk warlord ​​Alexander Zakharchenko, who was blown up in August 2018.² Assassinations and unexplained deaths have been more common in the Luhansk region, however, where locals were suspected of score-settling killings and Russia may have disposed of its proxies who failed to toe the line.³ Meanwhile, in non-occupied Ukraine, Russia targeted at least two high-ranking Ukrainian intelligence operatives in 2017 and 2019.⁴ 

Russia’s all-out assault on Ukraine in late February 2022 prompted a surge of assassination attempts in the southern Kherson and Zaporizhia regions (see graph below), large parts of which Russia seized in the initial stages of its war virtually overnight. As Russia suppressed protests against the occupation, local pro-Ukrainian militias took on both Russian troops and occupation officials. Ukrainian local administrators who switched sides were also frequent targets. Most victims and survivors of assassination attempts — increasingly undertaken by means of planting explosives rather than through gunfire — were middle-ranking officials and, to a lesser extent, heads of smaller settlements. Most incidents, however, occurred in the largest towns in the area, such as Kherson city, as well as Melitopol and Berdiansk in the Zaporizhia region. 

The run-up to referendums in occupied areas, which Russia staged to claim the areas as its own in September 2022, also came with an uptick in the number of assassination attempts. The list of targets included electoral officials and education staff involved in promoting pro-Russia narratives. Higher-ranking occupation officials proved out of reach, though there were reports of attempts on the lives of the Russian-appointed governors of Crimea, Zaporizhia, and Kherson — Sergey Aksyonov, Yevgeny Balitsky, and Vladimir Saldo. The latter’s voluble deputy, Kirill Stremousov, died in a suspicious car crash shortly before Russia’s withdrawal from Kherson city in November 2022.

Despite Russia’s harsh societal controls in the parts of Ukraine it still holds,⁵ attacks on occupation officials have continued over the course of the war with varied levels of concentration across occupied Ukraine. Among the areas of post-2022 Russian expansion, Ukrainian special services and pro-Ukrainian militias have continued to be particularly active in Berdiansk in the Zaporizhia region, where targets also include local entrepreneurs catering to Russia-installed authorities and the military. Meanwhile, attacks in the Kherson region have dwindled — possibly also due to Russian withdrawal from the eponymous regional capital in November 2022, where presumed perpetrators may have been concentrated. 

In the Donbas, the Russia-occupied part of the Donetsk region has been largely spared. Nevertheless, Ukrainian operatives proved capable of reaching targets there, too, as was seen with the December 2024 assassination of the head of the Olenivka prison, where an apparent Russian strike killed over 50 Ukrainian prisoners of war in July 2022.⁶ Meanwhile, the assassinations in the Luhansk region continue unabated — a trend that defies Russia’s more than decade-long control over the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, pointing to the viability of local resistance, varying effectiveness of law enforcement, and resulting opportunities for Ukrainian infiltration of the occupied areas. ACLED records at least five high-profile killings since 2022, including that of the notorious Russian-appointed interior minister, Igor Kornet.

It is an uphill task to attribute these assassination events confidently. The targets of these attacks in areas controlled by Russia since 2014 have likely been caught up in multiple crosshairs, including Ukrainian operatives or their local proxies, Russian special services, and local competitors. The swift Russian occupation of the larger parts of the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions since late February 2022 and the ensuing proliferation of assassination attempts in those areas can be more confidently attributed to local resistance; however, one should keep in mind the complex patchwork of actors and interests, as well as the informational isolation of all occupied areas, when defining perpetrators. Regardless of this complexity, with the unceasing occurrence of assassinations in occupied Ukraine, affiliation with the Russian occupation authorities or mere suspicion thereof imposes personal costs on those involved.   

Taking the war back to Russia 

The Ukrainian assassination campaign is underway not only in the occupied areas of Ukraine but also in Russia itself. This expansion into Russia occurred alongside the spillover of Russia’s war against Ukraine to its own border areas and later to the entire European part of the country, though at a slower pace. The sole incident in late August 2022 — a car explosion that killed Darya Dugina, the daughter of Russian nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin, who may have been the real intended target — could have prompted criticism of Ukraine’s backers in the West, dissuading further attempts that year.⁷ 

Yet already in 2023, assassination attempts inside Russia resumed (see graph below). While they initially focused on Russian propagandists such as Vladlen Tatarsky and Zakhar Prilepin, as well as Ukrainians who sided with Russia, including former member of parliament Ilya Kiva, Ukrainian operatives have turned their attention to Russian military officials involved in the air campaign on Ukraine. Victims have ranged from fighter pilots to senior staff and intelligence officers, a submarine captain, and the head of a drone training center. 

Since late 2024, the shadow war has escalated further, both in terms of the number of incidents and the level of seniority of targets assassinated, mostly in Moscow or on its outskirts. On 17 December, an explosive planted in a parked e-scooter killed Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov and his adjutant. Kirillov was in charge of Russia’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Ukrainian special services claimed the assassination was retribution for Russian forces’ use of riot control substances in battles in Ukraine⁸ — a tactic the Chemical Weapons Convention prohibits.⁹ A week earlier, unidentified perpetrators shot dead Mikhail Shatsky — an engineer who designed navigation systems for Russian missiles and drones.¹⁰ In late December, Russia’s security service claimed to have foiled other assassination attempts on senior defense ministry officials.¹¹ 

The number of assassination attempts in Russia in the first three quarters of 2025 has already exceeded the annual figures for the previous three years. Russian forces went into overdrive in their quest to conquer Ukraine by doubling down on their offensive in the Donetsk region and relentlessly bombarding the entire country and especially its capital, Kyiv. This likely incentivised the hunt for senior Russian military figures. In April 2025, car bombs killed a senior defense engineer in charge of drone jamming devices and another lieutenant general, Yaroslav Moskalik, who was deputy chief of operations in Russia’s General Staff and was involved in the Normandy talks that secured ceasefires in Donbas in 2014 and 2015. 

Most assassination attempts have been carried out with explosives, including mail bombs. These often involve unwitting accomplices recruited online within the country — a tactic that does not require infiltration and subsequent extraction of Ukrainian operatives and that Russia itself uses in its covert sabotage campaign in Europe. In 2025, ACLED also records at least two apparent suicide bombings: one that killed Armen Sarkisian, the founder of the Arbat battalion of ethnic Armenians operating in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, and another killing Zaur Gurtsiev, a former officer who led Russia’s aerial bombardment of Mariupol in 2022. In the latter case, the man who lured Gurtsiev on a date may have been unaware he was carrying a remote-triggered explosive.¹² The string of assassinations may have prompted replication by local Russian groups such as ChVK Vengeance, whose members gunned down at least two lower-ranking military officials they believed to be responsible for war crimes in Ukraine. It is unclear whether these domestic groups are coordinating their activities with the Ukrainian special services, nor is the extent of such collaboration.

The evolution of the assassination campaign within Russia — from propaganda mouthpieces to those prosecuting and masterminding the invasion — points to Ukraine’s willingness to go to great lengths to disrupt Russia’s war machine. Not only striking military and oil sites, Ukraine is also hunting down individuals directly involved in the ongoing attempt to conquer Ukraine. As in the case of attacking physical objects within Russia, the targeting of individuals directly or indirectly involved in the war may not significantly disrupt Moscow’s ability to wage it, but the possibility of an extrajudicial execution far from the frontlines puts extra pressure on potential targets. 

Russia strikes back

Despite Ukrainian claims of multiple Russian attempts to assassinate Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his chief of military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov,¹³ Russia appears to be in a catch-up mode in the shadow war (see graph below). ACLED records only nine Russian assassination attempts between 2023 and August 2025. While Russian operatives appear to give preference to shooting prominent Ukrainian nationalists, likely feeding into Russia’s official narrative of neo-Nazis overrunning Ukraine, the range of targets is expanding to senior military officers. Nevertheless, Russia may be lacking the capacity to act more boldly with professional assassins in a country at war where identification checks and surveillance are routine, as security services regularly report the detentions of local residents suspected of aiding Russia. Russia’s reliance on local and criminal proxies to carry out hostile activity in Europe following the expulsion of the sizable Russian intelligence contingent from Europe since 2022 points to the availability of operatives to deploy to Ukraine with fewer constraints on deniable action. However, preference has thus far been given to disposable non-professionals already in the country, including individuals radicalized or simply duped online.

A year before the assassination of Andriy Parubiy, on 19 July 2024, also in Lviv, a young footballer shot and fatally wounded Iryna Farion, a Ukrainian linguist and former member of parliament, outside her home. Farion was an outspoken critic of Russia’s linguistic and cultural influence in Ukraine, and a frequent target of Russian propagandists painting Ukraine as a fascist state.¹⁴ In March 2025, an AWOL soldier shot dead Demyan Hanul in Odesa; in May, a woman recruited by Russia’s special services wounded Serhii Sternenko in Kyiv. Both Hanul and Sternenko were associated with the Right Sector, a Ukrainian nationalist group. The attack on Sternenko occurred on the tailwinds of the European Court of Human Rights’ judgment that found Ukrainian authorities responsible for inadequate policing of clashes between pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian activists on 2 May 2014 in Odesa, during which 42 pro-Russian demonstrators died in a fire after barricading themselves in a trade union building.¹⁵ 

Incidents elsewhere across Ukraine appear to be largely opportunistic attempts carried out by locals recruited online to blow up random rather than specific targets, such as police offices across the country, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) headquarters in Kyiv city, and less prominent military officers. This has been particularly notable in Odesa — one of the most crime- and drug-prone cities in Ukraine¹⁶ — which could be fertile ground for Russian recruitment of local proxies to carry out assassinations. Since the beginning of 2025, ACLED records at least three explosions in the city that targeted a volunteer and two others involved in defense production and procurement. 

Limitations notwithstanding, Russia has entered the hunt for high-ranking military and security officers in Ukraine, likely in response to the earlier assassinations of the two Russian generals. On 10 July 2025, a masked gunman in Kyiv city assassinated Ivan Voronych, a colonel with the SBU. The Ukrainian cell of The Base, a far-right group that first emerged in the US and whose founder has suspected links to Russia, claimed responsibility, while Ukraine alleged that Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) contracted the killing.¹⁷ Voronych was involved in a range of special operations, including Ukraine’s counter-invasion of Russia’s Kursk region in August 2024.¹⁸ 

Russian special services’ recourse to non-Ukrainians from the underworld to kill Colonel Voronych may further point to the plausibility of the assumption that Russia may lack the capacity to insert and exfiltrate its own professional assassins in Ukraine. In late July, the SBU claimed to have foiled an assassination attempt on Serhii Filimonov, the commander of the Da Vinci Wolves battalion specializing in drone warfare. The suspect is a war veteran who may have believed he was blackmailed and subsequently recruited by the SBU rather than Russian agents.¹⁹

A vicious cycle begins

The duel of assassinations is likely to continue as both Ukrainian and Russian special services appear to have adopted the longstanding Israeli practice of executing their foes. Some in the Ukrainian leadership openly argue in favor of such an approach.²⁰ Pointing to apparent copying of tactics, ACLED also records several incidents of suspected Ukrainian operatives sending explosives planted in goggles to Russian drone operators, which is reminiscent of the Israeli pager operation against Hezbollah in September 2024. Similar to Mossad assassinations, the practice is already spreading beyond the two countries’ borders. In May, outside a private school in a Madrid suburb, unknown perpetrators shot dead Andriy Portnov, a senior official in the Yanukovych administration who designed legislation attempting to suppress the pro-European demonstrations in Ukraine.

Unbound by the strictures of conventional warfare, these assassinations may also outlast the actual war, as occurred with incidents between 2014 and 2022, despite the freezing of the frontline. The prosecution of key decision makers responsible for unleashing and executing aggression against Ukraine is unlikely to be a swift process, despite arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court for Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, and his top officials²¹ and the recent establishment of a special tribunal for Ukraine.²² Given these realities, the motivation to continue extrajudicial killings could remain high, even if a ceasefire or a definitive conclusion of the war were reached. 

More worryingly, the escalating assassinations point to a normalization of the practice. This is a parallel process with the unravelling rules of engagement in conventional warfare, exemplified by indiscriminate targeting of civilians and mistreatment or executions of prisoners of war. The ubiquity of unaccounted weapons and explosives, as well as experience in handling them in both countries, has the potential to support a proliferation of killings, both outside the regular chain of command and among former troops themselves. The practice may become a self-sustaining spiral of violence, taking a dangerous shortcut from due process and leaving no exoneration options to victims. As the all-out war in Ukraine escalates, so too does the shadow duel of assassinations in both Russia and Ukraine, as well as beyond. 

Visuals produced by Christian Jaffe.