The video discusses the assassination of Russian Lieutenant General Igor Kirilov in Moscow, an event linked to Ukraine due to his role overseeing Russia's use of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Ukraine's claim of responsibility for his assassination comes after convicting him in absentia for the use of chemical weapons. The assassination marked an unusual and significant escalation in Ukraine's ability to conduct such operations on Russian territory, raising questions about the impact on Moscow and its military leadership.

The discussion expands to the broader implications of Ukraine's assassination strategy, considering potential motivations and effectiveness, as well as the broader context of Russia's use of forbidden weapons in conflicts like in Syria and Ukraine. Analysts highlight the complex dynamics of geopolitical relationships, particularly with allies like China and adversaries like North Korea, and how these alliances shape and influence respective military strategies and escalations.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. assassination [əˌsæsɪˈneɪʃən] - (noun) - The murder of a prominent person in a surprise attack for political or religious reasons. - Synonyms: (murder, killing, homicide)

This assassination is absolutely incredible, really.

2. in absentia [ɪn æbˈsɛnʃə] - (adverb) - A legal proceeding conducted without the presence of the person involved. - Synonyms: (in one's absence, not present, unattended)

...a day after they tried him and convicted him in absentia of using chemical weapons.

3. sabotage [ˈsæbəˌtɑːʒ] - (noun) - The act of deliberately destroying or damaging something to prevent it from working properly. - Synonyms: (vandalism, obstruction, disruption)

Ukraine are pitching this as almost like a police action because I would have thought that targeted assassinations are cloudy in international law.

4. catharsis [kəˈθɑrsɪs] - (noun) - Emotional release leading to relief, often through art or confrontation with a feared situation. - Synonyms: (purging, cleansing, release)

For Ukraine there is an air of poetry here, an air of catharsis in terms of pursuing justice.

5. chloropicrin [klɔːroʊˈpɪkrɪn] - (noun) - A toxic irritant gas used in chemical warfare. - Synonyms: (tear gas, irritant, chemical agent)

One of the agents in question is called chloropicrin.

6. sarin [ˈsærɪn] - (noun) - A highly toxic synthetic organophosphorus compound used as a chemical weapon. - Synonyms: (nerve agent, chemical weapon, toxic compound)

I think the agents that were used in Syria, which I think was sarin particularly and one or two others were more obviously chemical weapons.

7. biological weapons [ˌbaɪəˈlɑʤɪkəl ˈwɛpənz] - (noun) - Weapons that use pathogens such as bacteria, viruses, or fungi to cause disease and death in humans, animals, or plants. - Synonyms: (germ weapons, pathogen arms, bio-arms)

But you have to go back a long way with Russia with chemical weapons, I mean, these are weapons, and particularly the biological weapons that I think the Ukrainians have also claimed...

8. geneva convention [ʤəˈniːvə kənˈvɛnʃən] - (noun) - A series of treaties and protocols that establish international legal standards for humanitarian treatment in war. - Synonyms: (international law, war treaty, humanitarian law)

And one, one of the things that came out earlier in the conflict, which was really interesting, some of the Russian prisoners of war that were taken clearly hadn't any idea about the geneva convention they were asked about

9. radiological weapons [ˌreɪdiəˈlɑʤɪkəl ˈwɛpənz] - (noun) - Weapons designed to spread radioactive materials without a nuclear explosion. - Synonyms: (dirty bomb, radiation arms, radioactive arms)

So biological weapons, radiological weapons, chemical weapons.

10. asymmetrical warfare [ˌeɪsɪˈmɛtrɪkəl ˈwɔrˌfɛr] - (noun) - Warfare between groups with unequal military capabilities, often involving unconventional tactics. - Synonyms: (irregular warfare, guerrilla warfare, unconventional fighting)

This is a very interesting one to watch in terms of asymmetrical warfare.

Ukrainian Scooter Bomb Kills Russian General - BBC Newscast

This assassination is absolutely incredible, really. On the streets of Moscow. That was Russia analyst Chris Steele, and he was talking about this bomb planted in a scooter which went off in Moscow, killing a top Russian general. What is going on? We'll find out on this episode of Newscast, the BBC's daily news podcast.

Hello, it's Adam in the Newscast studio. And on Tuesday, we woke up to the news that a Russian general called Lieutenant General Igor Kirilov had been assassinated outside an apartment block in Moscow. And very soon after that, Ukraine said that they were responsible for his death. So there's a big story here and a lot of backstory, too. So who better to help us out? He's taking a break from being in Ukraine, but it's the BBC's Kyiv correspondent, James Waterhouse, who is here in the studio. Missing Ukraine very much. So the snow starts to fall. I hear it's wet snow at the moment. And as a Brit, I quite like the cold. It's a novelty. When do you think you'll be back? Mid January, once I'm out of a sling after breaking my collarbone on a bike in London. So, yes, the irony of living and working in a war zone is not lost. And also welcome back Chris Steele, who former MI6 head of the Russia desk and author of Russia Trump and the Fight for Democracy. Hello, Chris. Hello. Although we can only buy that in America and Germany, that book at the moment, can't we? At the moment, though, I believe you can get it on Amazon, but don't quote me on that.

Okay. Right, so Igor Kirillov, Lieutenant General James, what do we, what do we think happened outside that apartment block? I think we can say with a fair bit of certainty that we have a senior high profile Russian general who, loosely speaking, was in charge of Russia's biological, nuclear and chemical weapons use. He was walking outside his building with his assistant in the early hours this morning. And a scooter that appeared to be packed, according to the Russian authorities, with around 300 grams of explosives was detonated remotely as he walked past, killing them both. You have Ukraine's security service, the sbu, claiming responsibility. And we have a whole host of verified footage that reflects that this that had, did indeed take place. So it is a coup for Ukraine a day after they tried him and convicted him in absentia of using chemical weapons thousands of times in their full scale invasion.

So, yeah, Chris, tell us a little bit more about who this guy was. We've obviously got the job title. James gave us a little hint there about some of the things he's accused of doing. Tell us a bit more. Yeah, I think the significance of this guy is that he was basically in charge of when weapons that should never be used on the battlefield according to international law. So biological weapons, radiological weapons, chemical weapons. And the accusation has been that the Russians have used this on the Ukraine battlefield. But also of course worth bearing in mind that they also assisted the Syrians to use them in Syria.

And this guy must have actually played quite a significant role, I would say, in liaison between the Russian military and the Syrian military. And I think it's quite curious actually this has happened a week or two weeks after the fall of the Syrian regime. And I wonder whether there isn't some Syrian angle to this, such as, such as maybe discovery of intelligence in Syria or documents in Syria that may have indicated where the guy lived or how he moved about or whatever. I don't know, but I think it is a bit of a coincidence. Right, but on that, if you, if you are to successfully detonate a bomb like this, you need a lot of surveillance, don't you? Need to know the, the patterns of this guy, where he's going to be at a certain time. So if it was turned around in a short space of time, it's quite the operation.

And did we know that the Ukrainians were capable of doing something like this, Adam? They love an assassination, carrying out state assassinations like this either in occupied territories in Ukraine or Russia itself. We have seen a senior naval officer killed in Crimea. We saw a prison boss in occupied Donetsk region who was killed by a car bomb. We've seen a Russian weapons expert shot dead near his home. Ukraine has claimed responsibility each time. And these are significant in the sense that they rightfully occupy headlines. They take out people of seniority, they send a message to those complicit in Ukraine. But the question mark for me is what do these individual killings do to Russia's overall full scale invasion?

I think critics over this strategy over time have often asked that very question because is this going to loosen Russia's Grip on the 5th of Ukraine it occupies? Unlikely. But as we've heard, it brings the war to people in Moscow that might otherwise choose to. To ignore it. And does that have an effect, Chris, either on the morale of the Russian people or the people who are part of the war effort? I think the military in Russia have suffered quite a lot recently in terms of purges as well. Not to be forgotten that apart from Shoigu being moved, a whole load of generals have arrested on corruption charges. And this will Further in, sort of demoralize, I think, the senior leadership in the military. So I think the Russian military is not in a good place at the moment.

And you know, they've also lost quite a lot of senior officers actually on the battlefield. There's still a question mark, I believe, over whether the admiral in charge of the Black Sea Fleet was, was, was killed or very severely injured last year with a Storm Shadow attack in Sevastopol. So I think that this is a significant attack. It's a high profile, high prestige target. And I think it also suggests that r Russia is rather complacent about the security surrounding its senior officers. I'm very surprised at the pattern of behavior and how easy this must have been, actually. And can you imagine what Russian retaliation might look like? Or is it just more of the same of what they're doing?

Yeah, it is. I mean, at the beginning of the war, we heard that Russia had an assassination hit list in Kiev of various people in the leadership, not just military, but also civilian. But we've not really seen that many successful Russian assassinations on the, In Ukraine at least we've had some political ones in Europe, most notably in Berlin, whatever it was called, who was taken out by that assassin, Krasikov. But that was before the war anyway. So I think, I think that actually the tempo, interestingly, of Ukraine's assassination program is picking up. Most of the cases you've just mentioned have taken place in the last few months. So this is a very interesting one to watch in terms of asymmetrical warfare, James, in terms of the crimes that this guy was accused of in Ukraine, you talk about the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield.

I hadn't really heard very much about that. Just tell us, paint a picture of what went on there. So what Ukraine is saying is that almost on 5,000 occasions, Russia has used chemical weapons illegally, as Chris says, on the battlefield. And one of the agents in question is called chloropicrin. It's this irritant gas that was first used in the First World War. It irritates the eyes, the lungs. It's not thought to be lethal in an open battlefield, but if you think about if you're sat in a trench and the only way in and out is by foot or by some kind of armored personnel carrier in the wide open.

If these chemicals are deployed, you're forced to run. And time after time, when we speak to troops on in the east, they say that would they lose guys when they're moving in and out of the trenches More than ever, it's less so the fighting or storming when, when losses occur. And so Ukraine is saying this has happened on a huge scale. We've seen soldiers show us footage on their phones showing the canisters used and we have the US that, that back up Ukraine's claims of Russia using these weapons in this way. So I think for Ukraine there is an air of poetry here, an air of catharsis in terms of, you know, pursuing justice in this way. It's trying to send the message that whether or not you end up in a criminal court, your day of reckoning will come. I think that's what Kyiv is trying to do.

And so Ukraine are pitching this as almost like a police action because I would, I would have thought that targeted assassinations are, are cloudy in international law. And Ukraine always try and sort of maintain the moral high ground here. But I think Ukraine would argue that high ground comes under the COVID of Russia's full scale invasion. And as long as Russia is throwing thousands of men at trying to chew up as much Ukrainian territory as possible, as long as it rains down hundreds of drones and missiles continually, this is not like with, like this is Ukraine using in my mind a more superior level of intelligence to carry out these kind of attacks.

And as Chris was mentioning there, it's hard to make a distinction on the other way by Russia because when it comes to Russian operations in Ukraine, it's a much blunter instrument that is used because of the tactics described. You know, before the invasion, Russia had a well established intelligence network. The problem was the information they were feeding back to Moscow was inaccurate. And that is why Russia suffered the shocks that it did in those early weeks.

I'm just thinking back to the Syria angle on this and, and the use of chemical weapons. If you think about it, that in a Syrian context, in 2013 there was a massive parliamentary battle about how to deal with Assad using chemical weapons. And it became a massive transatlantic sticking between David Cameron and Barack Obama. But yet we've got these weapons being used on the battlefield in Ukraine and we don't see the same international uproar about that. What's going on there? Why is that? I think the agents that were used in Syria, which I think was sarin particularly and one or two others were more obviously chemical weapons. I think Russia's kind of deliberately operating in a slightly sort of gray area here with chemical weapons that maybe aren't lethal.

Phosphorus is another one. I think that's been used to smoke people out and to get an advantage on the battlefield, which isn't an obvious breach of the Chemical Weapons Convention, but you have to go back a long way with Russia with chemical weapons. I mean, these are weapons, and particularly the biological weapons that I think the Ukrainians have also claimed that Russia's been using on the battlefield, although there's less evidence of that, that are outlawed under international law. And therefore, you know, that the whole empire, military empire that exists underneath this guy Krillov, as was, is effectively the activities of a rogue state.

And is there also something about how Russia chooses to project power that means they're quite often falling back on chemical weapons? I mean, we've got the big inquiry into what happened in Salisbury with the script house and the poisoning there. Like, what is it about the Russian kind of war fighting psyche that means they reach for these tools? Yeah, again, as I say, there's a long tradition of this in the Russian chemical weapons program goes back decades and so does a biological one. In fact, I remember when I was in Moscow in the 1990s, the revelation that Russia was running a biological weapons program illegally at that time was a big shock to the system and to the government, in fact. So, so I think there is, you're right, culturally and historically, a dependence on, on some of these weapons.

And I think it's to give them an advantage on the battlefield. That is, is a case of, you know, their troops not obeying international law. And one, one of the things that came out earlier in the conflict, which was really interesting, some of the Russian prisoners of war that were taken clearly hadn't any idea about the geneva convention they were asked about. They didn't even know what it was. And that relates to the use of these weapons, of course, on the battlefield. They don't actually realize or know that what they're doing is a war crime, which is they're operating in a kind of different moral universe from their opponents, a vacuum, in fact. I mean, the other half of Kirillov's job description was, was nuclear weapons. Like, what's a way of thinking about nuclear weapons and, and the Ukraine invasion?

Well, there was an attempted distinction in 2022 where it was feared that Russia would escalate and use what was called a tactical nuke, a smaller scale bomb that could destroy a sizable chunk of a town and cause thousands of deaths. But ever since then, Vladimir Putin hasn't been shy to rattle the nuclear saber, to constantly remind the west that he is in control of the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. So I think that is the extent for me as to the role of nuclear weapons in this war. You have the west fearful of things spilling outside of Ukraine's borders, which it truly has now. You have the west fearful of Russia using more lethal weapons. And you have Russia looking to play to those anxieties. Why? Because it directly affects the speed and scale of support that Ukraine receives.

So I think that is as far as it goes when it comes to this general's portfolio. And I think another important point there and something that we understand to be the case, that the Chinese have been a big restraint on Russia torque and considering of using nuclear weapons on the battlefield. The Chinese have told the Russians that they mustn't use these weapons. And because Russia and Putin are so dependent now on China, both economically and politically, it would take an awful lot, I think, to raise the conflict to a point where Putin felt he had to use a nuclear weapon.

And talking about Russia's allies, there's been lots of reports the last few days about what these North Korean troops are actually doing. And the idea being that they're there to help the Russian effort in the Kursk region, which is the bit of Russia that Ukraine surprised everyone by invading a few months ago. James, what, what do we think? We know. So we've got to keep an eye on the scale of what we're talking about here.

We've got the US And Ukraine saying the first North Korean soldiers have been killed in Russia's Kursk region in this small patch of territory that Ukraine seized back in August. There is a whole host of content online appearing to show Asian soldiers in Russian uniforms lying dead. Kyiv is saying that around 30 soldiers are known to have been killed so far. When we're talking about reported Russian losses of 1200 a day, that gives you an idea of of the small scale we are talking about. We've also got the west saying these North Korean soldiers are fair game. They are legitimate targets if they are taking part in this invasion. What this has always been is more geopolitically significant because this, the involvement of North Korean soldiers is a symptom of how Russia with its new relationship with China, with its steepening relationship with North Korea, with its continued relationship with Iran.

It's an example of how this new axis of power is trying to continue to upset the traditionally Western dominated world order. So that's a big picture Y but nevertheless, the sight of a dead North Korean soldier is still significant for that reason. And coming back in on that, actually there are suggestions that the Chinese are not at all happy about the deployment of North Korean troops in Russia And I suspect that one of the Rubicons there is whether the North Koreans actually start fighting on internationally recognized Ukrainian soil, as opposed to what we think they're doing at the moment, which is operating on internationally recognized Russian soil. So that will be an interesting element. But as I say, apparently both. Well, certainly South Korea, but also China not at all happy with this as an escalation of the war. And the reason for that is because you.

You suddenly get these soldiers exposed to new technologies and they become battle hardened. And when you have soldiers that are exposed to active warfare, that makes them a very different security proposition. How do you mean? Because if you look at most of the world now, if you look at the British armed forces at the moment, we're not, you know, broadly speaking, involved in any kind of war or operation. So soldiers predominantly take part in humanitarian work. They go through exercises, relentless training, all that you would associate. But there is a huge difference between that and active operations where you are engaging enemy troops and, you know, with all of those associated risks. And I think you have to underline just how bizarre this situation is.

Even a couple of years ago, if you'd suggested that there'd be a battle going on inside Russia between North Korean troops and Ukrainian troops, I think people would have thought you. You needed to wake up and smell the coffee. So there's a very strange set of relationships developing here. This war is developed in the most extraordinary ways. This assassination is absolutely incredible, really, on the streets of Moscow, a full general in that position. And I think there'll be a lot of surprises to come before this conflict is over.

POLITICS, GLOBAL, ECONOMICS, CONFLICT IN UKRAINE, RUSSIAN MILITARY, ASSASSINATION, BBC NEWS