Murder, He Wrote

WHEN TWO COUNTRIES are at war, it does not require too much conscience to try to kill off the enemy’s leadership. There are thousands being eliminated by their armies daily, so why should the life of the people helming the war be sacrosanct?

This week, Russia accused Ukraine of trying to assassinate its president Vladimir Putin using drones. Its former president and a close Putin aide, Dmitry Medvedev, said that they now had no option but to kill Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Ukraine denies that it tried to kill Putin. We will not know the truth and it does not matter. Once war starts, there is nothing called truth, only propaganda. The outrage exhibited by both sides is pointless posturing when assassination would have been an objective from the start. Putin some time back said that Russia would not kill Zelenskyy but is there anyone, including him, who believed it?

And yet, assassination has not the same effect when done by Russia and Ukraine. The end of Zelenskyy will do nothing to ensure Russia’s objective because they are now combating popular resistance. Zelenskyy might be a charismatic leader but if there is no one to replace him, that is not necessarily a good thing for Russia. The resistance would just fragment into multiple groups all over and the Russians will have a bigger headache. Like the American experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, they will spend a decade or two in an endless quagmire and eventually leave. The assassination of Putin is a different thing altogether. It will almost certainly end the war because there is really no one to take over from him and enjoy the same autocratic power. Plus, this war is almost entirely his brainchild, and without him, neither would the Russians have the motivation nor the will to carry it through when the whole Western world is railed against them. The death of the two leaders produces entirely different outcomes.

Assassinations, when pursued by countries, are moral black holes. War is an excuse for doing all the things that decent people otherwise wouldn’t. Barack Obama signed a lot of papers that sent drones to kill those the US dubbed terrorists in other sovereign nations. But if someone had brought these same targets before him and asked him to shoot them, he couldn’t have, but is there really a difference when he is the one who is deciding the death? As a television actor a decade ago, if Zelenskyy was asked to kill someone, he would have found it impossible. As a leader of a nation under attack, he now takes such decisions without second thoughts, including the alleged assassination attempt of Putin. And should Ukraine eventually triumph, he will not lose much sleep on the many lives he was responsible for ending. There is nothing like a larger cause to make human beings perform actions that are crimes when done for personal profit. Killing, through most of human history, has been an easy solution for most problems by those with power but fortunately, civilisation deems it appropriate in only certain contexts now.

assassinationattemptUkraine crisisVladimir PutinZelensky