The Ukrainian secret police announced on Tuesday that two officials were arrested on charges of conspiring with Russia to assassinate senior figures like Zelensky and Budanov via drone and missile strikes. This news came a few weeks after Poland claimed something similar, which preceded the Russian Interior Ministry putting Zelensky on its wanted list last weekend and one day after Russia’s foreign intelligence service said that the US wants to replace him. Here are some background briefings:
* 19 April: “Poland’s Latest Russian Spy Scandal Might Be A Case Of Ukrainian Entrapment”
* 5 May: “Is Zelensky’s Life In Danger Now That He’s On Russia’s Wanted List?”
* 7 May: “Russia Hopes To Influence Ukraine’s Possibly Impending US-Backed Regime Change Process”
No matter what its foes and some misguided friends from the Alt-Media Community alike speculate, Russia actually has no interest at all in assassinating Zelensky. It never made a single attempt on his life during the numerous times that he visited the front lines, in connection with which it’s important to recall President Putin’s reported promise to former Israeli Prime Minister Bennett in spring 2022 not to harm his counterpart. Doing so, the Russian leader might have feared, could be exploited by NATO.
After all, he’s been very careful to voluntarily restrain his forces’ conduct throughout the course of the special operation, which has yet to formally transition into a “war” from the Kremlin’s perspective of how Russia is fighting it at least. He’s patiently maintained this approach in spite of numerous provocations by Ukraine and the West, all of which could have reasonably served as the pretext for him to declare total war. Quite clearly, President Putin is loath to do so, which is his right as Russia’s leader.
He’s averse to catalyzing any sequence of events that could spike the risk of World War III by miscalculation, with his decision to commence the special operation being a notable exception, which he’s said on many occasions was done solely because the alternative was to inevitably lose sovereignty. Considering this, he was never going to order Zelensky’s assassination since NATO could exploit that to commence a conventional intervention, thus leading to precisely the scenario that he wants to avoid.
President Putin’s concerns about this are heightened like never before after the signals that some Western countries recently sent about conventionally intervening in Ukraine, which prompted him to order tactical nuclear weapons exercises in an attempt to deter them as was explained here. Assassinating Zelensky now would be the worst possible time to do so since it could spook the West into commencing such an operation out of fear that it’s required in order to “prevent Ukraine’s fall”.
Zelensky himself knows this, which is why his secret police and their allies in Poland are concocting these false flag assassination scares with a view towards moving the needle on Western elite opinion in the direction of conventionally intervening in his support before that supposedly happens. Likewise, the most hawkish anti-Russian policymakers in the West are also aware of this, which is why they might try orchestrating an actual false flag assassination that could then be blamed on Russia for that purpose.
It therefore isn’t Russia that has an interest in assassinating Zelensky, but he himself who has an interest in making the West think that it does, to say nothing of that aforesaid policymaking faction that understands the political importance of him being “martyred” in the present military-strategic context. Putting it all together, it can be concluded that the publicly revealed threats to his life are probably false flag scares, though actual such threats likely do indeed exist but come from the West instead of Russia.
