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Notes -
Ukraine could be aping the strategy of Israel here. There's a growing consensus that Israel thinks it has "escalation dominance" in its proxy war against Iran. They can embarrass Iran and Iran will just have to take it. If Iran strikes back too harshly, the U.S. will stomp them.
Therefore, Israel, bleeding a death by a thousand cuts, must take an offensive posture to draw the U.S. into the war. It hopes to provoke Iran into attacking, thereby getting more military support or at least money. It might work. Iran is apparently planning a significant reprisal for the assassination of the Hamas leader on their soil. And the U.S. is trying to talk them down, promising support to Israel if they do attack too harshly.
This logic seems to hold for Ukraine even more. They are losing a war of attrition and may be facing a manpower collapse in the near future. As time goes on, the West tires of this war. The Ukrainian flags quietly disappear from the Twitter bios. But if Ukraine can provoke a Russian atrocity, it will get more Western support, more arms, more dollars, and maybe even NATO troops. This is their best bet to "win" the war.
I don't consider Israel's assassination of the leader of Hamas on Iranian soil a big escalation. It seems like just the normal thing to do with terrorist leaders.
Edit: also, I think the US Government might continue to supply Ukraine indefinitely, as long as the voting public doesn't actively oppose it. It's not like we live in a direct democracy where every voter has to actively re-up on the decision to arm Ukraine once per year, it's more delegated/technocratic/deep-statey than that. Whatever words you want to use to describe it.
As much as I don't trust the unelected bureaucracy about some things, this way of making the decision seems fine to me.
Have they, or anyone, done it before on the soil of a country that is friendly to the leader and has sufficient state capacity of its own that there isn't some sort of "we're just doing policing for you that you would be doing yourself if your country functioned" narrative that lets everyone save some measure of face? Israel assassinated some Iranian scientists before, but that seemed like a lower-ranked target than the leader of an allied military (and anyway was shut down by US pressure about a decade ago). This seems akin to if Russia went from having that Chechen militiaman shot in Berlin to blowing up Zelenskiy (or at least Syrskiy?) during one of his visits to the West, which surely would be seen as an escalation - or Ukraine going from merely blowing up Russian milbloggers to setting a bomb in Russia for Kim Jong Un.
Hezbollah isn’t a nation, it’s a paramilitary force designated a terrorist group by the US and allies and the GCC.
Why does the way that the US designates it matter? Whether it's an escalation or not surely depends on the perception of those affected by the measure, as understood by those who took it - if I know that you will consider some step a greater infringement of your interests than anything I have done before and yet I take it, then I am escalating. Russia considering Zelenskiy and/or the state of Ukraine illegitimate would not have any bearing on how escalatory an assassination of him would be either - or are you implying that this is different because the US is the one that thinks Hezbollah is illegitimate?
Has Russia not tried to assassinate Zelensky many times? AFAIK he is only being kept alive because Western intelligence is in charge of his movements.
If they have (and, well, what do we know if there is no success and no public record of claimed attempts?), they surely haven't tried to do so on the soil of a Western country?
I've got no idea if it's true, but why would you assume that they wouldn't? They've carried out assassinations in western nations before.
The difference gets to the meat of this whole discussion - Russia assassinating a Russian dissident on Western soil is less of an affront than Russia assassinating a Western-aligned militiaman from a third country (as with that Chechen-Georgian they got in Germany), which in turn is much less of an affront than assassinating a leader of a Western-aligned nation or NGO. Going from left to right on this scale is what one would call escalation. Maybe they would, but then they would be escalating; it seems like they haven't, and the most likely reason for that is that it would be an escalation that they did not want to go for.
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