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news analysis
Ukraine’s forces are steadily losing ground on the battlefield. The assassination of a top general in Moscow won’t improve their war effort, analysts and Western officials say.
Michael Schwirtz has been a correspondent in both Moscow and Ukraine, mostly recently covering the Ukraine war.
Dec. 18, 2024, 11:11 a.m. ET
Ukraine’s brazen assassination of a Russian general on a Moscow street this week was a triumph for Ukraine’s intelligence services, showcasing a decade’s worth of investment in developing the skills, technology and ingenuity needed to operate successfully behind enemy lines in wartime.
But it was a limited triumph.
Killing the general, Igor Kirillov, 54, will no doubt enrage the Kremlin and spread a degree of fear among the country’s military and political elites, military experts said. It also eliminates a top military leader, who, according to Ukrainian officials, had ordered the use of banned chemical substances against Ukrainian troops.
What it will not do, according to Western officials and experts, is improve Kyiv’s position in its war with Russia. On the battlefield, Ukraine’s forces continue to steadily lose ground to their larger and better-equipped adversaries. On Tuesday, Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, the commander of Ukrainian forces, said active fighting was occurring along more than 700 miles of the front line, including major Russian offensive operations in several regions.
“I think there’s a psychological impact that suggests to the elites that we can find you wherever you are and you’re not safe,” said Douglas London, who served as a C.I.A. station chief three times before retiring in 2019, referring to the assassination. “I don’t think it’s really going to have an effect on their war fighting capability.”
On the battlefield, the situation has not looked this desperate for Ukrainian troops since the start of the invasion. Russian forces have moved into the outskirts of Pokrovsk, an important rail hub, and are threatening the major cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, all in the eastern Donetsk region. Things are so dire there that officials have ordered the evacuation of more than 300,000 residents still living in the region.
Meanwhile, Russian forces, augmented with fighters from North Korea, have launched a counteroffensive aiming at pushing the Ukrainians out of their foothold in Russia’s Kursk region, where they have occupied a significant patch of land since the summer. (Some North Korean soldiers have died in the fighting, American military officials have suggested).
