Russia and Ukraine Fight Global Shadow War

The war between Russia and Ukraine stretches far beyond the trenches. Kyiv has been waging a shadow war, hunting Russian operatives and collaborators around the world. Now, as the Kremlin steps up its own covert campaign, Ukraine’s intelligence services are proving far more effective.

Just weeks earlier, in July, Colonel Ivan Voronych, a senior SBU officer involved in special operations, was gunned down in Kyiv, an attack Ukraine says was orchestrated by Russia’s security service using far-right extremists as proxies.

As part of broader efforts to destabilise Ukraine from within, Russia has also ramped up its covert operations, including using Telegram to manipulate Ukrainian children into carrying out suicide bombings.

But the data shows that Kyiv has been far more effective in striking back. According to ACLED, since 2022, Ukraine has carried out more than 140 assassinations and attempted killings of Russian targets in occupied territories and inside Russia itself—more than 10 times the number attributed to Russian intelligence.

In December 2015, the SBU orchestrated the assassination of Pavel Dremov, a Russian proxy commander, in occupied Luhansk. Acting on a tip about Dremov’s fondness for Range Rovers, SBU operatives smuggled a vehicle into Russian-held territory, rigged it with explosives and had a local informant hand him the keys. The next day, they remotely detonated the bomb, killing him instantly.

The following year, Ukrainian special forces carried out a sabotage mission in Crimea, killing two Russian officers in a firefight. Moscow retaliated with its own assassinations, including a 2017 car bombing of Maksym Shapoval, a top Ukrainian intelligence officer, and a failed attempt two years later on Kyrylo Budanov, who now serves as Ukraine’s military intelligence chief.

Indeed, Ukrainian intelligence has demonstrated its ability to strike deep inside Russia. In December 2024 and again in February 2025, Ukrainian operatives reportedly assassinated two senior Russian generals in separate precision attacks: one was killed by an explosive device planted in an e-scooter in Moscow, and another by a car bomb. Kyiv has also targeted dozens of high-profile figures linked to war crimes and atrocities committed against Ukraine.

Oleksandra Ustinova, a Ukrainian member of parliament from the Holos party, told me: ‘Clearly, they’ve been effective in terms of tactical outcomes, many of the missions have succeeded, including high-profile assassinations beyond Ukraine’s borders.’

The underestimation of Ukrainian intelligence hasn’t been confined to Europe. Kyiv has targeted Russian assets in Mali, Sudan and Syria, and has even contemplated operations in South Africa. Ukraine’s military intelligence reportedly helped enable an ambush in Mali that killed 84 Wagner mercenaries in July 2024. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova went on to accuse Ukraine of ‘opening a second front in Africa.’

According to Serhii Kuzan, chair of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, many of those killed were ex-convicts who had previously fought in eastern Ukraine, some as far back as 2014.

As noted by Nichita Gurcov, a senior analyst with ACLED, ‘The number of assassination attempts in Russia in the first three quarters of 2025 has already exceeded the annual figures for the previous three years.’ This surge likely reflects Moscow’s deteriorating battlefield position and its delayed adaptation to the realities of a long-running intelligence war. Russia has made ten failed attempts to assassinate Budanov.

In July, Reuters noted that at least 11 senior Russian commanders had been eliminated since 2022.

Following the assassination of Russian generals, Ustinova noted that while the Kremlin’s inner circle had benefited from tighter protection, Russia’s counterintelligence services had been far less effective at safeguarding lower-ranking officials.

On 1 October, a Ukrainian drone strike killed Volodymyr Leontiev, a Russian-installed official in Nova Kakhovka implicated in abductions and torture. Days earlier, Ukrainian intelligence assassinated a Russian lieutenant colonel in Stavropol Krai. And in mid-September, Kyiv struck deep in far eastern Russia, killing members of the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade in Vladivostok accused of war crimes. Kyiv described the attack as ‘revenge for atrocities against Ukrainian prisoners of war.’

Colonel Roman Kostenko, a Ukrainian member of parliament and former special-forces commander, said Kyiv plans to emulate Mossad-style campaigns to track down those responsible for atrocities, a program he predicts will run for decades. Any negotiated peace, he warned, would be ‘only the beginning’ as perpetrators would be pursued everywhere, and that they ‘will be afraid not only to leave the territory of the Russian Federation

David Kirichenko is an associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.

This article appeared originally at The Strategist (ASPI).