Government high-level security usually has a certain institutional knowledge built up over decades, or even centuries. High level government officials also can have restrictions on where they can go or even whether or not they can engage in certain activities.
Something like the US Secret Service, for example, has been providing protection to government officials since 1901, lots of trained agents, an entire fleet of vehicles from cars to aircraft, and other forms of support for their “mission”. A private security agency is unlikely to have so many resources.
Private individuals - even very rich ones - may think they know what sort of security they need, but are unlikely to actually be experts. The are not assigned security, they hire the security they think they need. And they can dismiss or ignore their security at will (unlike some government officials) which can expose them to considerable danger.
Also, not every ex-pat Russian is an oligarch - there are a variety of people who are former Russia citizens now living in the West and some of them are not very well off, and not able to hire private security.
There’s also a big difference to the consequences for Russia between assassinating their own expats and assassinating foreign govt officials. Nations are peeved when Putin kills his own expats on their territory, but the consequences are generally expelling some diplomats and criminally prosecuting the perpetrators if they can nab them. On the other hand, the consequences of assassinating western officials is likely to be dramatically increased support for Ukraine, which is precisely the opposite of what Putin needs in order to salvage something from the situation he’s gotten himself into.
The number of billionaire oligarch’s is going to be limited by the value of a countries assets. If even they own absolutely everything, there is an upper limit.
In a Ukrainian TV interview highlighted by the Institute for the Study of War, Budanov said Russia had gone from firing 60,000 shells a day (the top of the range suggested by Ukraine’s most senior military commander in August) to “19,000 to 20,000”, explaining why Russia has been so keen to seek arms from Iran and North Korea.
Much of Moscow’s military effort has gone into a cruel and relentless bombardment of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, leading to longer and longer blackouts across key cities. But there are very tentative signs here too that Russia is faltering: it fired about 20 cruise missiles at Ukraine on New Year’s Eve – serious of course, but nothing like the 80 to 100 it unleashed on days in October and November, although only a few days earlier in December, 69 missiles were fired at Ukrainian targets.
Ukraine’s air defences, a focus of western supply efforts, appear to be improving, particularly against slower-flying Shahed drones. On Sunday, the air force claimed it had shot down all 32 of the drones launched since midnight, and in Kyiv only a car was damaged overnight.
seems those were newcomers - fresh in from russia - all “stored together” (to be able to keep tabs on that unruly crowd) and the russians also stored HExplosives in the same place … all within himars range (what could go wrong?)
Will this ever end??? (russian stupidity, that is)
The Russian Defence Minstry have said that 63 of their servicemen perished in Makiivka attack. Not that I trust them, but I also doubt that the real number is as high as 400. But it might be up to 400 casualties i.e. dead + injured.
Talking of casualties vs killed, I notice that the Ukraine defence ministry now say “killed” in their most recent infographic:
I dunno. There were reportedly 600 soldiers in the base. It was a three story building that just isn’t there anymore. Hundreds dead doesn’t seem like much of a stretch.
That’s probably an extension of their “we won’t tell Russia how you surrendered” policy. We all know that there are a lot of Russians who won’t be going home because they don’t want to, because they’re safer in the POW camps, but better for them (and probably their families) if they’re officially “killed”.
I doubt that. I take that to mean they won’t report if a given POW was taken while actively resisting and simply overwhelmed (capture), or if they abandoned their position and came in under a white flag without orders to do so (desertion).
For Ukraine to report people who surrendered as “dead” would create a number of problems from an international law perspective, and also just a practical perspective.
I’ll say it again, they need to go after Russian energy assets. The US can probably tell them how to start a cascade failure of their electrical grid. Russians need to feel the loss of infrastructure to appreciate how wrong the war is.
