Transcription
Wet work is the old intelligence community term for assassination operations. The name comes from the fact that these missions often leave behind blood, hence the wet part.
A series of increasingly bold assassinations have now struck Russia's high command far from the front lines. And what most people don't realize is that all of these killings are part of a much larger wet work campaign on a scale that we haven't seen since World War II. And a campaign that's designed to pressure Russian authorities into ending the war.
According to leaked European intelligence reports, Putin has now become so fearful of these operations that he has stayed in his underground bunker for weeks on end to avoid these assassination attempts. So, today I want to look at the unfolding assassination campaign and we'll ask if this kind of assassination strategy like this even works.
For nearly 3 years, one of Russia's most senior generals lived with the kind of security most people can only imagine. He had elite bodyguards, all of his communications were encrypted. He traveled in armored government vehicles. Yet, on the morning of December 17th, 2024, that didn't change a thing.
The way Kirillov landed in the crosshairs in the first place is part of a familiar pattern. Ukrainian prosecutors formally charged Kirillov with war crimes. But, why do that? It almost seems symbolic. What good is a criminal charge against a Russian general sitting comfortably in Moscow? Ukrainian investigators were building a legal justification for what was about to happen.
Kirillov headed Russia's radiation chemical and biological defense troops. It's an entire branch of the Russian military. Officially, that organization exists to protect Russian soldiers from chemical and biological attacks. Ukraine alleges that it was doing something far more than that. According to the SBU intelligence service in Ukraine, Russian forces used chemical agents thousands of times during the war. Ukraine, the United States, and several Western governments accuse Putin of employing chloropicrin, which is a choking agent not used in wide scale since the First World War. It's outlawed internationally by the Chemical Weapons Convention. Ukrainian officials claimed thousands of their soldiers had been killed and wounded with the weapon from Russia. It causes severe irritation of the eyes, coughing, choking, difficulty breathing, and much worse than that. It's used to force troops to get out of cover, particularly to get them to get out of trenches.
Kirillov allegedly personally ordered the individual chemical weapons attacks, and by killing him the Ukrainian SBU believed that it would send a message. But the challenge was enormous. First, they had to find him. Human intelligence on the ground in Moscow had to identify his residence. Ukrainian agents on the ground studied his routine. They figured out which entrances he used. They determined when he left for work. The sources did this inside one of the most heavily monitored cities in the world. This is a pattern of life done ironically to cause a pattern of death.
How do you hide an explosive? City scooters are everywhere nowadays. Probably seen them. They're basically ugly urban camouflage at this point. And if you've ever tripped over one blocking a sidewalk, you've identified exactly why they're useful in this case. Nobody looks twice at them. The assassin's team decided to hide the explosives inside the electric scooter and position it near the entrance of Kirillov's apartment building. According to Russian investigators, the device contained roughly 300 g of TNT equivalent and was connected to a hidden camera overlooking the entrance. The video feed allowed handlers to watch the building in real time.
Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov walked out of his apartment building in Moscow, and seconds later he was dead. The explosion ripped through the entrance of the building. Windows were blown out nearby, and debris were scattered across the sidewalk. It killed both General Kirillov and his aide instantly. The attack itself was shocking because the video of it was plastered all over the internet for the public to see. But what was even more unbelievable was its location. This was in Moscow, the heart of the Russian state. Somehow, someone had just assassinated a three-star Russian general in his own capital. And that's the thing about bodyguards, they can protect you from a lot of threats, but they can't protect you from having habits.
The assassination was months in the making. Shortly after the attack, an SBU source reportedly told journalist Kyrylov was a war criminal and an absolutely legitimate target. quickly announced the arrest of a 29-year-old Uzbek national. According to the Russian FSB, he had been recruited by Ukrainian intelligence and promised $100,000 along with relocation to anywhere in Europe in exchange for helping conduct the attack. Maybe that's exactly what happened. Maybe it isn't. What remains undisputed is the result, though. One of Russia's most senior generals was dead, and the implication extended far beyond Kyrylov himself. The assassination proved no Russian official was safe hundreds of miles from the front line. The campaign is sparking finger-pointing inside Russian high command about who's at fault for the security failures and whether it's really even Ukrainian intelligence who are responsible for these assassinations.
At the center of the operation was a former Ukrainian police investigator named Vasyl Maliuk. Maliuk took over the SBU during the war and helped oversee its evolution from a service that was largely focused on counterintelligence into one increasingly focused on conducting targeted killings and murders deep inside Russia. Under his leadership, the SBU stopped playing defense. To Maliuk, this was only the beginning. What he had in plan would extend far beyond Russian generals.
Many of the tactics Maliuk used against Russia was originally developed by Moscow itself. In a strange twist of history, the Kremlin helped create the intelligence culture that is now hunting many of its own officers. In many ways, Ukrainian intelligence officers inherited these assassination tactics. They were trained inside the old Soviet system. The SBU itself is partially descended from the Ukrainian branch of the KGB. The tradecraft changed and the loyalties changed, but many of their old methods survived.
The expression wet work is actually a translation of the old Russian term mokroye delo. It's traced to criminal slang from the 1890s in Russia. Wet work was pioneered by Russian intelligence in the years leading up to World War II. It's a staple of their operations. It's a tactic that has fallen out of favor in European and American agencies nowadays, but the playbook is old.
In 1940, Leon Trotsky, a dissident of Joseph Stalin, was living in exile in Mexico. Agents from the Soviet NKVD infiltrated his inner circle, gained his trust, and then one day inside his own home, Trotsky was struck in the head with a mountaineer's ice axe. Not exactly subtle. After World War II, they stood up the KGB's first chief directorate foreign intelligence Spetsburo 13, also known as, you guessed it, the Department of Wet Affairs. Nice to meet you. Yes, I work for the Department of killing people. What do you do?
If we look closer, there's a logic to who ends up on the kill list. Looking at the whole campaign as a whole, you can sort the targets into three categories. There's military generals. There's people that Ukraine views as traitors. And then there's the men behind the missiles. These people are those who had command platforms, launched missiles, or built the weapons themselves.
Chief Kyrylo Budanov wanted to hit their logistics. His wet work unit 2245 planned a bold operation that would go after less high-profile Russian targets to begin with. Captain Stanislav Rzhitsky had been the commander of the Russian Kilo-class submarine Krasnodar, which launched Russia's top-range Kalibr cruise missiles designed for devastating precision. According to Ukraine's military intelligence, the submarine at which he had commanded had launched a cruise missile strike had launched a cruise missile strike that had hit the central Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia killing dozens of innocent civilians.
On the morning of July 10th, 2023, the commander left his apartment and started his daily routine. He ran through the peaceful streets of Krasnodar, Russia. He had ended his tour as an active submarine commander and Ryzhitsky was now serving in a shore-based position. So, he was involved with military mobilization and recruitment activities. The war was far behind him at this point, or so he believed. Everybody thinks that they're unpredictable until somebody starts taking notes. His daily routine had become easy to anticipate. It was Agent 47's dream target because the detail that made this story famous is the shocking lack of operational security that the commander pursued. Ryzhitsky used the public running app Strava to map his route, timing, location, and the location was visible to anyone who would care to look. During one of his daily jogs, this is when a man appeared and shot Ryzhitsky seven times with a Makarov pistol at close range. In fact, in a move that shows there's dark sense of humor in the Ukrainian intelligence agency, HUR, just hours after he was killed, Budanov reportedly liked Ryzhitsky's last logged run on Strava account bearing the name of the HUR chief himself. It was rubbing salt into the wound. Operational security is important. Posting your exact location every morning is sort of the opposite of that.
Killing a retired submarine commander was one thing. Reaching a high-ranking member of an entire naval fleet would be something else. Captain First Rank Valery Tronevsky, who was chief of staff of the 41st Brigade of Russia's Black Sea Missile Ship Squadron in Sevastopol. He allegedly ordered cruise missile strikes on Ukrainian civilian targets. So, the Ukrainian SBU managed to get a human source deep inside Russia and fix an IED to the underside of his car ala Irish car bomb style. As a result of the explosion, the Russian captain's legs were blown off and he died of blood loss, according to the reports.
The battlefield had expanded, but it didn't stop there because Russian military officers could always be replaced. Their next in line command might be less experienced, they might be more careful than their predecessor, but there would always be another commander to fill the ranks. However, there were wet work targets that were more difficult to replace and in some cases were irreplaceable. Usually, that has to do with targets that are not even in the military.
Just a month later than this, on a snowy December morning in 2024, a Russian man named Mikhail Shatsky was walking through the Kuzminki Forest Park outside of Moscow. He's the general designer at Russia's Mars Design Bureau and the man who personally led the development of the Kh-69 cruise missile. The missile had become one of Russia's newest precision long-range strike weapons. Shatsky was also involved in attack drone development. His knowledge and his skill set were extremely rare and difficult to replace. If he could be reached, it would be more challenging to replace him than simply promoting a rank below him. Ukrainian HUR agent approached him in the secluded forest park and then opened fire. The Russian engineer was shot dead. Ukrainian HUR sources told the Kyiv Independent, quote, "Anyone who is involved in the development of Russian military industrial complex is a legitimate target of the defense forces of Ukraine." The target list had expanded dramatically at this point. Russia's military industrial complex was no longer safe.
At the beginning of the war, Ukraine primarily focused on military commanders who were operating just near the front lines. By 2024, that logic had evolved. Ukrainians were hunting the men that were designing weapon systems. In other words, Ukraine had effectively declared that Russia's entire war-making apparatus was part of the battlefield now.
But, this capability didn't appear overnight. When Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, and the relatively new Ukrainian government was met with an intelligence service which was by all accounts a total mess. The Ukrainian SBU had been created back in 1991 at the end of the USSR, and by 2014 it was widely seen as corrupt, politicized, and full of Russian moles. However, within the years following 2014, the Ukrainian SBU was transformed from an empty rack full of Russian spies to an effective intelligence service for Ukraine, much to the help of the American CIA. According to the New York Times, the CIA had arrived within days of the revolution, and over the next 8 years had helped build out a major team. In fact, the CIA worked with the Ukrainian SBU to build a walled-off arm called the Fifth Directorate, insulated from the rest of bureaucracy, and free, as they hoped, of Russian penetration. Unit 2245, at the same time, the US intelligence worked to help rebuild that with the HUR, including training that elite paramilitary unit 2245. And they were tasked with confronting separatist sabotage and performing reconnaissance deep in occupied territories during the war in the Donbas, eliminating significant figures within the pro-Russian forces. The general named Valeriy Kondratyuk took over and personally lobbied the Americans to help rebuild this group. At one point, the CIA's deputy station chief, Khodakovsky, reportedly handed over without warning a stack of top-secret files. One former US official said, quote, "I was like, holy shit." And he was like, "Yes, we have a gift." One former US intelligence official later described the HUR partnership this way, saying, "HUR was our little baby. We gave them all new equipment and training." End quote.
They are supported by a broad coalition of Western intelligence agencies. British MI6 contributed to intelligence sharing. Poland and the Baltic states became critical partners due to their deep experience monitoring Russian military activity. The difference in the Ukrainian method is that this is basically what would happen if you took the ruthless Soviet old method and had a baby with the fancy new Western intelligence support that has modern surveillance technology and cyber capabilities. The result was something neither side had anticipated. The result was an intelligence ecosystem far larger than Ukraine could have built alone. What remains unclear is where that support ends.
The new combination of Soviet and Western style was put to the test in October 2016. A Russian-born separatist commander in Donetsk, known by the call sign Motorola, stepped into the elevator of his apartment building. Motorola was the leader of the Sparta Battalion, a pro-Russian armed group fighting against Ukraine. One of the most notorious separatist units in the Donbass. Motorola had once boasted, "I shot 15 prisoners dead. I don't give a No comment. I kill if I want to. I don't if I don't." But elevators are one of those places where once the doors closed, your options become extremely limited. No amount of pressing the door open button will get you out of there faster. Unknown to Motorola, a bomb had been hidden in the roof of the elevator cabin, detonating and killing him and his bodyguard instantly. What's important here is that the CIA had later learned that the killers of the Motorola were members of the Ukrainian fifth directorate, the same unit the CIA had trained, and they started freaking out. Leading some to wonder how involved the Americans had become in this tactic of assassination.
But there's evidence some of these killings weren't even done by Ukrainian operatives themselves. Historically, Russian security services have a long record of internal power struggles. Many of their separatist commanders were difficult to control, and they often clashed with their Russian handlers. There's long been speculation that some of these deaths may have been internal Russian score settling rather than Ukrainian operations.
But do wet work campaigns work? Do they have the intended effect? Governments have long believed that if you could just kill the right person, the war would become easier. Sometimes they're right, other times the results are complicated. The closest analogy to Ukraine's wet work campaign is the Allied campaign of assassinations against German leadership and infrastructure in World War II. During World War II, Allied intelligence services often targeted the managers of the Nazi war effort. It was to make the machinery of the war function less efficiently. Sometimes they avoided killing a leader if they felt that they could be replaced by someone who was more competent. Sometimes the campaign had been designed to get as close as possible to the top without actually touching it.
In 2025, Lieutenant General Yaroslav Mosolik, the Deputy Chief of the Main Operations Directorate of the Russian General Staff, was walking to his car as one does, and Yaroslav was personally responsible for preparing situation reports on Ukraine for Putin himself. He started his car for the last time that day. The explosive packed with shrapnel ripped through his Volkswagen Golf in a residential courtyard just east of Moscow. There is six degrees of separation from Putin. This was one degree of separation. The timing was extraordinary because on the same day, US envoy Steve Witkoff was in Moscow to meet Putin. Similar to the previous assassinations, the Russians, in response, arrested not a member of Ukrainian intelligence directly, but a 42-year-old Russian national who confessed to planting the device in exchange for $18,000. He probably could have gotten more.
Ukraine started off testing their tactics close to the front line and then expanded it further. They killed three high-ranking generals in the space of a year, each around the area of Moscow. But Ukrainian HUR believed that they could only get so far with taking out generals, scientists, officers, and engineers. There was one final unlikely category of supporters of the war effort that would also be targeted next.
There's a saying that you can't kill an idea, but it hasn't stopped people from trying throughout human history, and sometimes they wound an idea very badly enough that that idea becomes less attractive. Ukraine expanded their wet work campaign to people they considered to be propagandists who were peddling Russian narratives. These are people who, while not active on the battlefield, are involved in the information war. It's a controversial dark side of the campaign.
Ilya Kiva was a former member of the Ukrainian parliament who fled to Russia when the invasion started. There he justified the invasion while on Russian state media. He called for Ukraine to surrender. As a response, Ukraine had initially sentenced him to 14 years due to treason. But clearly the SBU chief Maluk had something else in mind. Failure. Just southwest of Moscow in December 2023, Ilya was sitting in a parked car when a gunman approached. Ilya was shot multiple times. The HUR spokesperson went public saying, "Quote, we can confirm that Kiva is done. Such a fate will befall other traitors of Ukraine as well as the henchmen of Putin's regime." SBU chief Vasiliy Maluk stated in March 2024 in a Ukrainian TV interview that the agency had killed more than a dozen Ukrainian collaborators in occupied territory.
Mikhail Filipanko was a former separatist commander that Ukraine accused of personally running torture chambers in Luhansk. On November 8th, 2023, he walked to his personal car like he'd done many times before. Except this time agents had hidden a bomb on his vehicle and it exploded killing him. HUR claimed responsibility going as far as to post his home address on Telegram doxing him.
The campaign was not limited to Ukrainian traitors, but expanded to those directly involved in Russia's pro-war media and propaganda machine. Vladlen Tatarsky, real name Maxim Fomin, was one of Russia's most prominent pro-war milbloggers. a man who stood at Kremlin annexation ceremony in September 20202 and said on camera, quote, "We'll defeat everybody, kill everybody, rob everybody we need to." Simply put, this man was extremely important to the Kremlin in creating Russia's narratives about the war in Ukraine. At a public event in St. Petersburg, he was handed a decorative bust. It looked like a nice gift from an unassuming person. Inside, agents had hidden explosives and a remote detonator. The explosion killed him and wounded by standers at the event.
Unintended targets have been hit in the campaign as well. Darya had a famous father, Alexander Dugin, a well-known ultra-nationalist political commentator who's close to Putin. A remotely detonated car bomb killed her. US intelligence later reported that the intended target had been her father. The Ukrainians denied involvement.
With over 120 successful assassination missions, Moscow started to devote enormous resources to hunting Ukrainian operatives. The Russian FSB, Russia's primary domestic security service, responded to many of these attacks by launching massive manhunts and attempting to trace Ukrainian intelligence handlers inside Russia. The pattern has been clear. Nearly every time that there's been a killing, they arrest someone that they say was a collaborator.
At the same time, Russian intelligence services have pursued their own wet work campaign against Ukrainian leadership, attempting to assassinate the head of their drone program, attempting to assassinate Ukrainian President Zelenskyy repeatedly. Russian plots targeting senior military officers have relied on recruited agents and insiders. In many ways, this shadow war is what makes the conflict so unusual.
However, whether or not such a tactic of assassinations is an effective strategy of warfare is heavily debated, according to military analysts. Mark Galeotti, a Western analyst, wrote of Lieutenant General Mastalyk, "His death will create short-term disruption within the GRU as his replacement gets up to speed and some small long-term damage to the senior officer talent pool. But, the truth is that however effective an operation by Kyiv's operatives is, as the likelihood of some kind of ceasefire in the war looms, the overall impact will be, as one British security official admitted, a story today forgotten tomorrow." Goletto's making the point that even killing a three-star general creates only a short-term disruption, and when a successor eventually takes over, the war simply goes on.
However, there is a second function that does seem to be effective, and that's the psychological function. Putin reportedly has his bodyguards, cooks, photographers, most of his whole entire team thoroughly screened before they're even get close to him. They are unable to use their personal phones. OpSec is normal around high-profile politicians, but it's unusual to have to use devices without any internet access. The leaked European intelligence alleges that Putin even stopped going to his residences in Moscow after unverified claims that Ukraine attempted to assassinate him there. This unusual behavior reportedly started happening after a car bomb killed the top general Fanil Salavarov in Moscow. The Institute for the Study of War, ISW, said it observed, quote, corroborating evidence of enhanced security measures for Putin and the high-ranking Russian officials due to the success of the assassination campaigns. The assassination of Salavarov was the final straw. It is said to have sparked finger-pointing within Putin's own administration about who's to blame about all of these security failures. Russia's now providing federal protective services to 10 additional high-ranking generals, limiting the movement and communication of the highest ranks of Russia. That seems to be a worthy goal.
Nigel Gould-Davies of the International Institute for Strategic Studies said this will deeply disconcert other senior elites, including military figures, that they can, in the capital itself, be killed like this. Because one of the main effects of these high-profile wet work campaigns is bringing the war to the daily lives of Russians who had previously been able to ignore it. The logic is any Russian commander who had previously considered acting brazenly, such as striking civilian infrastructure, may do so with the risk of their life.
Whether these assassinations actually shorten the war remains an open question, but in the words of HUR chief Budanov, "We have killed Russians and we will kill Russians anywhere in the world until Ukraine's complete victory."
If you found the video interesting, check out this playlist on covert operations or this video here. I'm your average infantryman, Chris Cappy, ending transmission.