enemy senior leadership are sometimes needed to be alive, when you have a trusted enemy leader, it'll be easier to have him surrender and most of his population and soldiers will stop the attacks, but when you assassinate the leader it'll create smaller factions and less trust in the newer ones and it will be a nightmare to make a peace agreement because the leader that was put in place after the assassination doesn't control shit.

I don't think so because eliminating them wouldn't actually solve anything since the actual decision making centres are in the west. The puppet regime in Ukraine is also deeply incompetent and generally hated by the public. So, it made sense to just let the clown show go on until now.

nah you gotta keep someone "legitimate" on the other side to negotiate with