Key Points – The notion of assassinating Vladimir Putin to end the Ukraine war, while a recurring Western fantasy, is a strategically and legally perilous idea.
-Such an act would likely escalate the conflict, potentially leading to a harder-line Russian successor, a wider war, and even nuclear retaliation, without resolving Ukraine’s fundamental military challenges.
-Crucially, it would violate core principles of international law against targeting heads of state—a standard that, if abandoned for Putin, could be applied to any leader, including Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy.
-True resolution lies in sober realism and diplomacy, not in a “masterstroke” killing that risks global chaos.
If Killing Putin Is Justified, What Stops Russia from Killing Zelensky?
It is a fantasy that just will not die. Another Kremlin security scare, another flash of speculation online, another round of breathless commentary. Maybe someone is finally trying to kill Vladimir Putin. Maybe that is what it will take to end the war. One clean shot. One collapsing regime. Peace at last.
But if that idea is serious – if we are not just indulging a lurid Western daydream – then we need to ask a much harder question.
If assassinating Putin is fair game to end the war, then what exactly stops Russia from killing Zelensky?
That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a legal and strategic mirror. Because everything said to justify killing Putin – that he is prolonging the war, that he is personally directing atrocities, that he is the face of national resistance – can just as easily be said, almost word for word, about Ukraine’s president. Zelensky has rejected every compromise. He has tied Ukraine’s entire war effort to his own public image. He has made himself indispensable to the cause.
Does that make him a legitimate target?
Of course not. And anyone who argued otherwise would be rightly condemned. Zelensky is the democratically elected head of a sovereign state. Targeting him would violate every core principle of international law, especially Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter, which prohibits the use of force against the political independence of any member state. It would not be strategy. It would be terrorism. It would be a war crime.
But those same rules apply to Putin. Or at least they should.
The moment we start carving out exceptions – for leaders we happen to despise – we begin to tear up the legal architecture that has held back the worst instincts of great powers for the better part of a century. We do not get to say assassination is illegal when it is done to us but somehow acceptable when done by us. That is not law. That is retribution.
And retribution is not strategy.
Killing Putin Would Be a Mistake – And Maybe World War III
Killing Putin, so the argument goes, would be a masterstroke. Remove the head of the snake and the body will die. No need for another grinding Ukrainian offensive. No need for more American aid packages. One bullet and the war ends.
But that is not how great power wars work. Removing a leader – any leader – does not end a war that has outgrown him. It escalates it.
This war is not held together by Putin’s personal will. It is driven by the strategic logic of the Russian state: secure the eastern oblasts, maintain the land bridge to Crimea, and ensure that Ukraine remains permanently outside the NATO alliance structure. These goals are widely shared across the Kremlin’s national security elite. If Putin were killed by a drone, a missile, or an inside job, those objectives would not evaporate. They would harden.
Take a look at Russia’s bomber fleet. The Tu-95s and Tu-160s are some of the most destructive platforms in the Russian arsenal. Yet their role in this war has been marginal. Operation Spiderweb, the much-publicized missile barrage last week, was more theater than warfare. Aimed at social media optics, not battlefield results. These bombers could have been used to flatten entire Ukrainian cities. They were not. That may not be moral restraint, but it is operational restraint. And that restraint, for now, belongs to Putin.
Does anyone seriously believe that kind of discipline would survive a decapitation strike?
For all his ruthlessness and cynicism, Putin has fought this war as a campaign of attrition, not extermination. He has been deliberate, not reckless. That makes him dangerous, yes, but it also means he has kept open certain backchannels, maintained certain thresholds. Whoever replaces him will be a man from the siloviki class – Patrushev, Shoigu, someone with no hesitation and something to prove. Their first task will be to avenge the fallen leader. That does not lead to de-escalation. It leads to escalation. And not just in Ukraine.
How NATO Could Be Pulled Into A Wider War
If there is even a hint of Western involvement in Putin’s death, the conflict would almost certainly spill beyond Ukraine’s borders. Poland. Romania. Gray Zone attacks. Space infrastructure. Sabotage. The Russian nuclear doctrine explicitly allows for the use of nuclear weapons if the state or its leadership faces an existential threat. Assassination is one of the fastest ways to cross that threshold.
And yet the war’s fundamentals would remain unchanged. Killing Putin will not reverse battlefield losses. It will not replenish Ukraine’s dwindling manpower. It will not fix the growing recruitment crisis, nor will it solve the problem of public fatigue with mobilization. Ukraine is running out of men. The West can send tanks, shells, drones but it cannot create soldiers out of nothing. And no sniper’s bullet will change that.
Which brings us back to Zelensky. If tomorrow a Russian missile hit his motorcade, and Moscow announced it had eliminated the figure personally responsible for rejecting every peace offer and for prolonging the war, how would the West respond?
An Action to Avoid
We would not call it a masterstroke. We would call it what it is: terrorism. A violation of international law. An act of aggression. A war crime.
But the logic would be the same. The justifications would be identical. The difference would lie only in who is applying the logic and who is on the receiving end.
This is not about defending Putin. It is about defending the line. Because once that line is crossed – once the killing of a head of state becomes a legitimate tool of statecraft – the entire post-1945 legal order begins to unravel. The age of restraint, imperfect as it was, collapses. What follows is not peace. It is vendetta.
Those pushing this idea from think tanks or former intelligence circles are not strategists. They are fantasists. They mistake war for a Netflix thriller and Putin for a villain to be eliminated in the third act. But this is not fiction. It is war. And if we start deciding that international law applies only to people we like, then we are no longer defending order at all. We are defending power.
There are no shortcuts in war. No magic solutions. No clean endings. Assassination is not a strategy. It is a failure of strategy.
Putin will die someday. So will Zelensky. But the war will continue, because the war is not about personalities. It is about states. Interests. Geography. Power. And the only path out of this disaster is not through one spectacular killing, but through the slow, sober realism that accepts the world as it is and works through it.
If you would not accept the logic when applied to Zelensky, then do not embrace it for Putin.
Because the moment you justify it for one, you justify it for all.
About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham
Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham.
Russia’s Bomber Forces
Andrew P
June 4, 2025 at 8:14 am
Strategic assassination has been done before and it usually doesn’t work to end a war.The Russians have already tried to kill Zelensky more than once, and Ukraine has tried to kill Putin. In a war of attrition like this, knocking off the head doesn’t work because the regime quickly grows another head. But if the entire upper and middle echelon of the regime were taken out in a single strike, that could collapse a regime that was already teetering.
bobb
June 4, 2025 at 8:43 am
Putin needs to be replaced by medvedev. Or someone else.
Putin has become weak, unable to think properly, too afraid and unable to reason correctly.
Could be due to increasing age. The passing of the years takes a toll on a person’s mental alertness, mental acuity, cognitive ability and reflexes.
Putin no exception.
But putin has been particularly slow to respond to fast changing conditions directly affecting the ukraine conflict.
How many times already have drone strikes reached deep into russia and How many times have the ukros attacked kerch bridge.
Putin needs to go as the window of opportunity to achieve clear Cut victory is closing rapidly.
A leader owes it to the people to deliver results, but for putin, he has failed to deliver. Has clearly failed.
Madison Dines
June 4, 2025 at 2:07 pm
I think that elements of this argument are specious, at best. One thing that I have noticed about Andrew, is he would rather not look at strong data points that suggest that Russia has an ideological and (to them) “existential” need to completely erase even the idea of the country Ukraine.
The USSR banned the instruction of the Ukrainian language, and has always justified their conquest of that nation as just another absorption of another “Russian” population. All of this is an important context for what Putin wrote in July 2021 about how Ukraine “isn’t a real country” and is merely an Oblast of Russia.
The purpose of this war for Russia is thus, to destroy the entire concept of a Ukrainian nation, and their track record suggests that their approach to Chechnya is how they plan to go about this.
Now, Russia doesn’t have any real existential need to fight this war, but the Kremlin has proven that Ukraine definitely does.
The author couches the lack of escalation by Russia (I would dispute that) with their unwillingness to use nuclear weapons (yet).
But I think that this has more to do with the Biden administration and earlier European governments promising direct and proportional military retaliation for a nuclear attack by Russia, as it’s crucial for NATO to maintain the deterrence afforded by nuclear weapons and the taboo in using them aggressively.
Russia won’t use nuclear weapons, because the risk is that any proportional response is more damaging (in a relative sense) to Russia than it would be to NATO or Ukraine.
And indeed, the correct way for NATO to handle a Russian nuclear escalation ladder would always be proportional retaliation, well telegraphed and explained in public before the whole world.
Capitulate and you incentivize nuclear blackmail. And for obvious reasons, you can’t escalate either. But you must not ever capitulate, even when your own populations scream in fear.
Swamplaw Yankee
June 6, 2025 at 9:50 pm
Another, fella, another instant Ukraine op-ed expert. He speaks, reads Ukrainian and is so knowing of it’s very long 6,000 years of history. Not!!
Yeah, brilliant, tell us readers that the war will continue. We are so shocked. The current war is now been going on for a thousand years. Hey, a bit down, there is a religious ethnic war now on for way over a thousand years. On October 7th, 8th and 9th, the streets of the USA and Canada were filled with millions of madly celebrational “citizens”, seemingly ecstatic that muslim military combatents had butchered Jewish and other faithful inside Israel. The concept of ” Feral conurbation ” urban areas/cities is politically downplayed by certain political groups. The op-ed love to PR that only Gaza or northern ireland erupts. Even North America has its “NO GO” zones, particularly for op-ed hacks.
The geography is a factor. If France or Germany touched rump russia as much as Ukraine, then these ethnic groups would replace Ukrainians as the victims.
The factor of interest is a factor. The orc peasant russian ethnic has had a thousand year history of sex trading Ukrainian children. The peasant russian would bi-annually run caravans to “harvest” children in the Ukrainian hinterlands.
As the russian orc peasant satiated themselves on the Ukrainian children, the GNP of ancient moscow increased on Ottoman gold as it was traded for the deflowered youth in the muslim sex trading fort in Crimea called Caffa.
Orcs, czars, czarinas, all allowed sex trading to go on. Big cash flowed into the czarist pockets with zero effort. When the WEST put pressure on the muscovite elite, the orc banned sex slavery only in rump russia but allowed slave concubinage to continue in the muslim khanates. The cash flowed in. The WEST was easily fooled again.
Today, the WEST is easily fooled again. Xi sends unending streams of military hardware and raw fodder state soldiers into Ukrainian lands to kill Ukrainians. Suddenly, Yankee op-ed writers demand that the Doodle Dandy think that the North Koreans are well educated men, there in Ukraine fighting on their own free will. A half million oriental serf drone operators can kill in far away safety many Ukrainian fathers fighting in front lines to liberate their kidnapped children. Hey, the op-ed hacks refuse to state that the HAN leader, Xi, has the CCP well inserted in this war on the WEST. Maybe Xi can help the Mexican Cartels. Give them cash to purchase those F-35’s looking for a home.
This fella even has the temerity to bring in a strategy blab. The strategy blab is just flotam and jetsam floating up and down the useless pages directed at the isolated, unexposed inner beltway reader.
The fella even touts that the USA should refuse to make amends for the 2014 sellout of the WEST’s geopolitical advantage in owning the Ukrainian Crimean land mass and Black/Azov sea zones to the prime vile cold war enemy: Putin. Yeah, the op-ed’s moron brain cells expounds that the Obama free, no-cost, gifting in 2014 of Ukrainian families to the orc Putin should be forgotten by the USA, made a permanent gift because of his hack agit-prop.
Kim Philby, etc., was gifted a real nice layout by the Commie elites in Moscow. The speculation is that agit-prop op-ed hacks will be remembered, rewarded, given nice layouts in Black seaside Crimean housing probably stolen from butchered Ukrainian families. Maybe some kidnapped kid will come from the russian sex trade as a freebie for table top dancing for the pleasure of the Yankee hack. -30-