Crossing the “Red Lines”
Target Assessment and Typology of the Post-Soviet Targeted Retributions
Resurgent Russia
Putin demonstrates a willingness to commit resources to assassinate those deemed dangerous to the power and public image of a “resurgent” Russia. Through a systematic collection and analysis of over 100 cases of possible Russian assassinations, we contend that Russian state-sponsored assassinations are primarily retaliatory in nature, with the goal of target terminal elimination.
Plausible Deniability
While select “special operations” are claimed by Russian security forces, others either do not see media circulation or they are subject to maskirovka. This research aims to de-obfuscate Russia’s ambiguous messaging and to present trends and distinct characteristics of Russian state-sponsored killings.
Recursion to avoid biases
Experimental studies have shown that ACH alone offers no mechanisms to mitigate the risk of cognitive bias or serial position effects in belief acquisition in intelligence settings without the inclusion of Bayesianism.
We included two recursive loops, reevaluating each evidence given the addition of new evidence.
ACH Workflow
This process requires a small team of analysts to brainstorm alternative explanations then list significant items of evidence for each hypothesis. Analysts then determine whether each piece of evidence is consistent, inconsistent, or not applicable to each hypothesis.
Methodology - ACH
For each hypothesis, the total inconsistency score (I t ) to be compared to the inconsistency score of each other hypothesis is then zero minus the sum of the inconsistencies for evidences j through k (because Inconsistency is inherently a negative number):
Findings
Most common targets
• Russian males age 40-49 (22 cases)
Findings
Most common Target Types
○ Oligarchs/senior economic figures (19 cases) ○ Senior military commanders (14 cases) ○ Critics/dissidents and opposition political opponents (13 cases each)
Overall trends follow to the subset of Russians
The majority of these targets are oligarchs and senior economic figures (19), senior military commanders (14), critics/dissidents (13), and political opponents (13).
Attack Type Correlated with Proximity to Russia
Aggregated Shooting Attacks occur closer to Russia, due to the proximity of the target to Russia and underlying operational conveniences.
Non-Shooting Attack Types Not Correlated with Proximity to Russia
While we may assume poisoning attacks have an inverse relationship with shooting attacks, we see that they are actually not inversely related. They are more evenly distributed, and thus a "simple" tool.
Note the operational convenience of explosions in Ukraine.
Russian-centric world events appear to be associated with state-sponsored killings
The average number of targeted retributions seems to increase by increments of 1 to 3 per year. Spikes in the numbers are likely in relation to major world events that have significance for Russian internal politics and foreign/security policies. However, the tenure of individuals does not seem to be related to rises in these averages, so long as the individual or organization share a common direction with regime trajectory.
Number of State-Sponsored Targeting by year and Russian Military and Political office Tenures
EU Demographics and Policy has little bearing on Russian Action
Target nationalities are represented in flags.
Russian Nationals per country (left, darker = more); Corruption Index (right, darker = lower score)
Future Research
Machine Learning Classification Model
Using our dataset on top of the Global Terrorism Database, we could fine-tune a classification model to reliably attribute suspected state-sponsored retributive killings to the Russian state.
Policy Recommendations - Eurostat
The data we use to discern potential salient background features and noise (population density, trust in the local police, etc.) are gathered from Eurostat. Eurostat reports primarily intra-EU or EU-member stats. We believe Eurostat could do more with their non-EU reporting partners (of which includes Russia) that could better influence the EU's mitigation and response to Russian retributive targeting.
Policy Recommendations - Reporting
Our ACH methodology relies on reporting - be it from the Russian government, European governments, or private reporting institutions (Bellingcat, CNN, MSNBC, etc.). We believe that reporting of these cases could be improved in both quantity and quality. We also believe the reporting of suspicious deaths should not be reported as isolated events and that they should be referential to similar cases. This would not afford Russia the ability to reply to select cases.
