Assassination Warning: Russia Has Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in Its 'Crosshairs'

As the war between Russia and Ukraine rages on with no end in sight, the Kremlin has indicated that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is squarely in its crosshairs, RadarOnline.com has learned.

The Hill reports that Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, told the state-run TASS media outlet last week that Zelensky is a "legitimate military target," signaling that more assassination attempts will likely follow.

According to Medvedev, "[Zelensky] already heads a political regime hostile to Russia, which is waging war on us" and "leaders of countries waging war are always considered a legitimate military target" — despite the fact that Russia initiated the conflict by invading Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.

This is hardly the first time that Russian President Vladimir Putin has tried to get Zelensky out of the way. In March 2022, shortly after the fighting began, Moscow sent an assassination squad from Chechnya that was identified and eliminated by Ukraine security forces outside Kyiv.

Then-Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council secretary Oleksiy Danilov reported at the time that Zelensky had survived multiple assassination attempts in the same week by Wagner PMC mercenaries and Chechen special forces, which were foiled in part thanks to anti-war intelligence officers in Russia’s Federal Security Services who tipped off Ukrainian forces.

Zelensky has reportedly survived at least a dozen attempts on his life. Last March, the Russian Defense Ministry said that "the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation launched a high-precision missile attack on a hangar in the industrial port district of Odesa," which exploded 500 meters away from a convoy carrying Zelensky and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.

Earlier this month, per The New York Times, Ukraine's security services arrested two Ukrainian colonels who had allegedly been paid by Russia to identify people close to Zelensky’s security detail who could "take him hostage and later kill him" and several other high-ranking military officials.

In November, Zelensky said that Russia still "wants very much" to oust him by the end of 2024. "The name of the operation is Maidan 3. It is meant to change the president. It's bye bye. Maybe it's not by killing. I mean it's changing. They will use any instruments they have," he explained. "So that's the idea, to the end of the year. They have even named the operation. But you see we can live with it."

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Would Zelensky's death lead to a decisive victory for Russia? It's not clear. Adrian Karatnycky, a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, argued that “the country has reached a point of very substantial solidarity and national unity, so if something terrible happened to Zelenskyy, it would not be as decisive as you might think.”

According to a study by Benjamin F. Jones and Benjamin A. Olken at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, “assassinations of autocrats produce substantial changes in the country’s institutions, while assassinations of democrats do not.”