Russian assassinations on Western soil demand violent retaliation

The only credible response to Russia deliberately murdering citizens of the United States or a European nation would be violent retaliation. This is not a hypothetical concern.The Financial Times reports that Russia’s GRU military intelligence service is escalating its assassination plots against European defense executives. While similar Russian plots have been disrupted since the February 2022 start of Moscow’s war against Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin is now pursuing attack plots with greater intensity. This includes Russian assassination plots on U.S. soil.Two things are happening here. CHINA IS IN BED WITH THE WORLD’S WORST REGIMESFirst, Russia has assessed that European powers will not respond robustly to a future assassination. It’s not hard to understand why Putin believes this. Recent GRU terrorist attacks across Europe have failed to produce any serious riposte. Nor have the numerous Russian assassination plots. On the contrary, President Donald Trump has rewarded Russia’s aggression and its increasingly brutal attacks on Ukrainian civilians through his deal to buy Russian diesel fuel.Another dynamic further underlines the West’s absurdly weak response to Russian aggression. Consider that while Russia works to murder European CEOs, Europe recently removed one of Putin’s top oligarch cronies from its sanctions lists.Also driving this assassination terrorism is Putin’s sense that he is at a pivotal moment in his war. With the Russian economy under heavy pressure, and unable to achieve significant military breakthroughs against Ukraine, Putin seeks options short of war that can intimidate the West into reducing its support for Kyiv. Putin’s apparent hope is that if CEOs start being gunned down or blown up in European capitals, European powers will fear that their only option is to go to war or appease a perceivably unconstrained Russia.Europe should wholly reject Putin’s calculus.It makes moral and strategic sense for Europe to continue supporting Ukraine. Putin’s invasion of that country reflects his ideological belief that Ukraine and other former Soviet-satellite states such as the Baltics and Poland be subordinated under a Russian imperium. If Putin succeeds in Ukraine, he will find reason to expand his conquests elsewhere in Europe. It bears emphasizing here that the extreme militarization of the Russian economy is plainly designed to provide a long-term means of waging war beyond Ukrainian territory.Yet, while Russian sabotage attacks across Europe are themselves outrageous assaults on national sovereignty, assassinations present an entirely new different level of threat.Any assassination of a Western civilian would underline Putin’s expansive sense of his freedom to escalate. In turn, any inadequate response would damage NATO’s deterrence posture and invite more lethal attacks in the future. Which is why any successful Russian assassination of a European or American CEO or, indeed, other citizen should result in violent retaliation.Ideally, this response would entail mirror retaliation by the nation of which any affected CEO has citizenship. Oligarchs who are interwoven into the Kremlin’s corrupt power structures would offer optimal targets. The U.S. could do this. Regrettably, however, France’s DGSE is the only European intelligence service currently authorized to carry out targeted killings. That means European powers would likely be limited to a military response.Two options present themselves in this regard.First, as President Emmanuel Macron has already claimed France is doing, European powers could conduct covert military reprisals against Russia. Alternatively, and more preferably in terms of reestablishing deterrence, a European power could launch a limited direct military response. The U.S. and other NATO members would need not join this retaliation, but rather emphasize their support for the alliance’s Article 5 mutual defense commitments. Overt retaliation would enforce an unmistakable cost on Russia for any assassination. It would also reeducate Putin into a new cost-benefit understanding of his brinkmanship.Some would argue that such a response risks war with Russia. But they are wrong. Putin is a rational actor. He knows his military, struggling to take even small parcels of ground in Ukraine, is currently in no position to fight NATO forces or, frankly, even a limited number of NATO states. Contrary to his claims of nuclear supremacy, Putin also faces far superior U.S. military nuclear forces. NATO’s supreme commander rightly outlined these combat advantages on Monday. They deter Putin against a full-scale war that Russia would lose, badly.UNABLE TO BREAK UKRAINE’S DEFENSE, RUSSIA EMBRACES ISLAMIST TERRORIST STRATEGYMoreover, this isn’t about doing anything immediately. Nor is it about responding to the arson attacks that have characterized Russia’s sabotage campaign until now. Instead, we’re talking about responding to high-profile assassinations if and when they occur. And restored deterrence in this extreme scenario would require more than diplomatic expulsions and sanctions. As in the Cold War, the only way to deal with excess Russian escalation is to meet it with equal or greater counterforce.Be under no illusions, a Russian outrage is coming. It’s coming because Putin believes he can get away with it. Western powers should warn the former KGB officer that he will pay for shedding the blood of their citizens.