Putin’s bloody playbook comes home to roost

The brazen assassination of political enemies is a defining feature of Vladimir Putin’s reign of terror. He delights in proving there’s no refuge from his retribution. London, Berlin, Istanbul—even Washington, DC — have all found his bloody fingerprints at the scene of mysterious murders. Capers like poisoning dissidents with novichok in British tea rooms seem to fill him with devilish pride.

Then, of course, there’s his penchant for getting oligarchs who have fallen out of favor to “accidentally” test gravity from their penthouse windows across Russia. These defenestrations have become folkloric memes, further burnishing Putin’s strongman reputation.

But on Tuesday, Volodymyr Zelensky flipped the script. In a Ukrainian “special operation,” he had Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, Russia’s nuclear defense chief, blown to bits in Moscow. And, just a week earlier, a cruise missile engineer met a similarly explosive fate in this Russian capital. These assassinations are more than tactical strikes. They’re Zelensky giving Putin a taste of his own medicine.

Zelensky strikes where Putin missed

Putin has spent two years trying in vain to assassinate Zelensky and other Ukrainian leaders. But his missiles keep missing. His spies keep bungling. The Kremlin’s once-efficient murder machine keeps floundering against Ukraine. Now, Zelensky is showing Putin that he has the same balls and the same reach. If the Russians thought Moscow was a safe haven, that illusion is now as shattered as Kirillov’s Moscow commute or Assad’s Damascus tea.

Indeed, the timing of this assassination makes it an especially bitter pill to swallow. After all, just last week, he had to help his puppet Bashar al-Assad flee Syria like a rat abandoning a sinking ship. And this was a humbling and humiliating encore to the rescue of his puppet Viktor Yanukovych from Ukraine. Add these assassinations to the mix, and Putin’s strongman image looks about as sturdy as a Lada on a dirt road.

Precision warfare versus genocidal onslaughts

Putin’s superpower military was supposed to crush Zelensky’s smaller army in three days. Instead, Zelensky’s forces have fought Putin’s to a three-year stalemate. That’s embarrassing enough. But now Zelensky is upstaging Putin in the “black art” of assassinations.

Notably, Putin’s targets are invariably political dissidents. Zelensky’s, by contrast, are enemy combatants like Kirillov — architects of Russia’s genocidal war machine. Targeting them and their war machinery is the precision warfare Israel should have used against Hamas. Instead, Netanyahu chose Putin’s primrose path: a genocidal onslaught in Gaza that punished civilians more than it crippled Hamas.

Zelensky just taught Putin a lesson in fear — flipping the script in Moscow with a move so bold it could have been ripped from Putin’s own playbook. Perhaps it’s time Western leaders learned that bold action can expose and erode a bully’s false aura of invincibility.