Disappearing Command: Assassinations, Purges, and the Erosion of Russian Military Leadership in the Ukraine War
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.62843/jssr.v5i3.566Keywords:
Leadership Decapitation, Kremlin Purges, Hybrid Warfare, Military Intelligence, Targeted Assassinations, Strategic Disintegration, FSB, Psychological OperationsAbstract
The research paper analyzes the attrition of senior Russian military leadership in the Russia-Ukraine conflict of 2022 to 2025. It highlights two apparent figures of external decapitation and potential internal cleansing on the one hand, dealings with established battlefield deaths, and on the other hand, killings of targeted assassinations in Russian territory. The research features military dispatches, open-source intelligence (OSINT), investigative journalism, and satellite-confirmed incidents to provide a strategic appraisal of what the researchers refer to as command disintegration, the gradual loss of trust, cohesion, and operational security in Russia's upper military reaches. Instead of some speculative claims, the analysis is based on those incidents of high-valued losses of confirmed cases where kinetic attacks and cognitive warfare intersect to disconcert leadership organization in authoritarian command systems.
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