Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you.
Posted on 08/30/2026 7:41:14 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
When is extrajudicial killing just war by other means, and when does it become a state-sponsored act of terror?
‘We were not terrorists but fighters for freedom who fought with our eyes open,’ Menachem Begin wrote of Irgun, the irregular group of fighters he led during the 1947-48 civil war in Mandatory Palestine, the tactics of whom included bombings and assassinations. But where does the 1 August bombing of the Balzi Rossi restaurant in central Moscow – which killed at least five people and injured more than 20– stand on the scale?
Some would describe the attack as a legitimate military operation. The bomb targeted the lavish birthday celebrations of Colonel-General Aleksandr Chayko, Commander-in-Chief of Russia’s Aerospace Forces (whose son-in-law died in the blast). Chayko commanded the northern group of Russian forces which advanced to the outskirts of Kyiv in February and March 2022, which pro-Ukrainian bloggers maintain makes him ultimately responsible for the massacres of civilians in Bucha and Irpin.
Following that logic, the attempted assassination of Chayko stands alongside heroic partisan killings of war criminals – for instance the shooting of Reinhard Heydrich, Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, gunned down on a Prague street by British-trained Czech agents in May 1942.
But if you believe that the Balzi Rossi bomb was justifiable, what then is the difference between that attack and the Irish Republican Army’s 1981 nail bombing of British soldiers at London’s Chelsea Barracks, or bomb attacks on Household Cavalry troopers and an army band in Hyde Park and Regent’s Park the following year? All were assaults on military personnel in a civilian setting in the cause of overturning a colonial occupation.
Our answer obviously depends on how we feel about the righteousness of the perpetrators’ cause. The US and UK have been taking out al-Qaeda and Isis members in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan by drone attack for years, accepting collateral damage to unlucky civilians as part of the butcher’s bill. Few would shed tears for Mohammed Emwazi – ‘Jihadi John’ – killed in a US-UK drone strike in Raqqa in November 2015 or ‘White Widow’ Sally-Anne Jones, terminated by a Predator drone in 2017. Israel’s Mossad, with its arsenal of exploding pagers and pinpoint hotel-room strikes, is a world leader in taking out enemies en masse wherever they find them.
Nevertheless, approving of extrajudicial execution opens a moral can of worms. We can say that it’s fine when Barack Obama smites his enemies but bad when Vladimir Putin does it because we approve of one but not the other. But that argument quickly slides into a dangerous moral ambivalence, a whataboutism of the kind that the Kremlin loves to exploit.
Kremlin-controlled Russian media have blamed Ukraine for organising the latest Moscow bombing. Officials in Kyiv, meanwhile, have remained silent. But the Balzi Rossi explosion is the latest in a long string of bombings targeting Russian officers, occupation officials and propagandists. In August 2022, Darya Dugina, a 29-year-old pro-war commentator and daughter of the nationalist ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, died in a car bomb blast presumably aimed at her father. In April the following year Maxim Fomin, a pro-war military blogger known as Vladlen Tatarsky, was killed by a bomb concealed inside a statuette presented to him as a gift during an event in St Petersburg. Zakhar Prilepin, a nationalist novelist and commander of pro-Russian forces in the Donbas, was badly injured by another car bomb.
Similar devices have, since 2022, killed three Russian lieutenant generals, a deputy mayor of Stavropol and the founder of a pro-Russian battalion in Ukraine. Ukraine’s SBU security service has either denied responsibility or said nothing about bombings on Russian territory. But it has claimed several identical bombings inside occupied Ukraine, including two lawmakers in the Russian-installed assembly in Luhansk, an official at the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and the former head of the Olenivka prison in Donetsk, all blown up by improvised explosive devices. Occupiers were ‘a completely legitimate target’, SBU sources told Ukrainian media.
Ukraine has also claimed responsibility for at least 15 assassinations or attempted assassinations by handgun that killed or wounded, among others, a Russian submarine commander, a cruise missile software engineer and the deputy head of GRU Russian military intelligence. Russia, for its part, has also organised at least six shooting assassinations inside Ukraine.
What makes some of these bombings especially morally complex is the apparent use of unwitting suicide bombers to deliver the devices. Darya Trepova, an anti-war Russian, maintained that she did not know the statuette that killed Vladlen Tatarsky contained explosives (she was nonetheless sentenced to 27 years in jail for murder). Zaur Gurtsiev, deputy mayor of Stavropol, and Armen Sarkisyan, founder of the pro-Russian ‘Arbat Battalion’, were killed by suicide bombers who were both apparently unwitting pawns with no known patriotic links to Ukraine and no observed desire to die for Kyiv’s cause. In October 2022 delivery truck driver Makhir Yusubov picked up a load of goods destined for Crimea after accepting an order on a logistics website. Halfway across the Kerch Bridge the truck detonated, killing Yusubov and damaging the bridge. Vasyl Maliuk, then chief of Ukraine’s SBU security service, publicly acknowledged the operation and admitted that Ukrainian services deliberately ‘used people in the dark’. It’s not known if the woman who delivered the bomb to the Balzi Rossi – reportedly wrapped as a present – volunteered for a suicide mission or whether she was just another expendable human carrier.
Is there a difference between killing a Russian commander on the battlefield and blowing him up at his own birthday party? You can argue that all’s fair in love and war, that the horror inflicted by Russia on Ukraine justifies killing enemy officers even when they’re unarmed and off-duty. But that moral choice comes with an uncomfortable trail of logical contingencies. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, every man who commits evil does it for reasons he considers good.
In the wake of the Hyde Park bombing the IRA put out a statement justifying killing British servicemen because ‘the Irish people have sovereign and national rights which no occupational force can put down’. The Kremlin liquidators sent to murder KGB and GRU defectors Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skripal undoubtedly saw their victims as traitors who had betrayed their country – and themselves as righteous executioners. Menachem Begin, in his memoir The Revolt, claimed that US president Harry Truman ‘said that he would have joined the “terrorists” had he been in Eretz Israel during the rule of the British’.
Yes, that’s a list of very different cases – bombing as an act of war vs poisoning as an act of state revenge, post-colonial independence movements vs sovereign warring states. But that’s the point. Circumstances matter.
Motivation matters. And here’s the nub of the problem. We can easily agree that our ends sometimes justify extrajudicial means, but not the ends of those with whom we disagree. Ultimately we judge the actions of our heroes and villains by who they are, not by the things they do.
To return to the original question: where does the Moscow bomb attack lie on the scale? Operationally, ordering this kind of suicide bombing is an outlier by the standards of any western army or security service – including the Israelis. Accurate targeting, as well as minimising civilian casualties, is an important part of the moral equation for any democracy. Even if drones inadvertently blow up whole wedding parties in Afghanistan the civilian chiefs who ultimately authorise such operations can be told it was a genuine accident. A 1kg bomb full of ball-bearings brought to a crowded restaurant, as the Balzi Rossi bomb was reported to be, is not by any stretch of the imagination a targeted means of assassination.
To be clear, there is no direct evidence that this attack was the work of the Ukrainian government. Indeed I honestly hope that neither the SBU nor the HUR was involved. Because whoever ordered the bombing is treading a dangerous path. First, being found responsible for an indiscriminate attack of this kind would erode the moral superiority that Ukraine undoubtedly holds as the injured party in this conflict. But more dangerously, it opens the door for a new tit-for tat front in an already supremely vicious war, fought not by guns and missiles but improvised explosive devices in restaurants. Is there a difference between these two methods of dealing death to innocent civilians? For many people the answer depends who’s doing the killing and who’s doing the dying.
|
|
Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
After WWII, the USA could have “colonized” huuuuuge areas of the world. We did not.
We rebuilt huuuuuge areas and supported modern, civilized systems and behavior.
I think there is a difference between collateral damage and targeted damage.
It looks like the bomb in Moscow was intended to damage anyone in the vicinity. That smells of terrorism.
…And look at the thanks we got for it!
Strictly speaking, all federal employees have been forbidden to take part in an assassination since Gerald Ford’s Executive Order 11905, which (among other things) stated “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.”
Just about every POTUS since then has issued an EO that modified some of the terms but the bit about forbidding “wet work” remains in place to this day.
> One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. <
That’s right. We see something similar in asymmetrical warfare. Filthy peasants with crossbows could take down noble knights. That was so “unfair” that Pope Innocent II actually banned crossbows (the ban didn’t do any good).
And as always, the winners get to write the definitive history.
Maybe 35 years ago I went to a talk given by G. Gordon Liddy. One thing he said was the US government sometimes assassinated people “for reasons of state”. And the American public would never know about it.
I know the G-Man liked to be dramatic.
But still…
G Gordon Liddy had a radio show back in the 90’s.
He was good on that format.
One place said when Nixon was talking to Liddy and others Liddy misunderstood a strategy and thought Nixon meant they should plan a killing. Liddy was ready but Nixon clarified it so Liddy knew he had been mistaken.
> G Gordon Liddy had a radio show back in the 90’s. <
Yes, I remember that well. Liddy was a hoot. He was a bit obsessive about combat knives, as I recall.
I actually bought an expensive (and powerful) radio so I could pull in broadcasts by Liddy and Michael Savage.
Ah, good times. Except for my then-girlfriend. She ran off with my CD music collection. Unforgivable.
Assassinated implies outside of the law. Execution is per the law (in a given country). We need to update our treason laws here because a LOT of people are taking actions to try and overthrow the government here and take us to a totalitarian system. Laws need to be taken to punish such action by execution. I mean, if anyone wanted my opinion...lol.
You forgot to include Subpart b, Section 2020ff-TDS. Exception made for conservative politicians thwarting Democrat actions to take the country to communism (i.e. - attempts to kill Trump).
the President of Haiti was assassinated by US intelligence community in 2021.
“reasons of the State” is what the international corporations/ oligarchy wants
https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber?s=20
Me...
> “reasons of the State” is what the international corporations/ oligarchy wants <
I won’t argue against that. Marine Corps General (and Medal of Honor recipient) Smedley Butler once said that “war is a racket”.
That comment doesn’t always apply. But it applies often enough.
There’s also a big difference when using such attacks during a war and using such attacks outside of a free, democratic government.
Moral high-ground.
Kyle McManus??
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.