Russia accused of using chemical weapons in Ukraine | BBC News - video Dailymotion

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#Russia #Ukraine #BBCNews Europe's top diplomat Kaja Kallas has sounded the alarm on Russia's increasing use of chemical weapons in Ukraine - citing German and Dutch intelligence reports that Moscow has used them at least 9,000 times since the start of the invasion.   Chemical and biological weapons are prohibited under international law, but intelligence indicates they are being dropped by Russian drones into Ukrainian trenches.   Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump says some Patriot missile defence systems should arrive in Ukraine within days.    The Security Brief’s Mikey Kay, a former Senior Officer in the British Military, explains.  Subscribe here: http://bit.ly/1rbfUog  For more news, analysis and features visit: www.bbc.com/news   #Russia #Ukraine #BBCNews

Transcript

00:00Well, welcome to the BBC's Security Brief with me, Ben Brown, and Europe's top diplomat,

00:06Kaya Callas, has been sounding the alarm on Russia's increasing use of chemical weapons

00:11in Ukraine, citing German and Dutch intelligence reports that Moscow has used chemical weapons

00:18at least 9,000 times since the start of the invasion.

00:22Speaking to reporters after a gathering of foreign affairs ministers in Brussels, she

00:26said the reports were of great concern.

00:29Well, with me to discuss all of this and also the latest details on US weapon shipments

00:35to Ukraine is our resident security analyst, former senior British military officer and

00:41assault helicopter pilot in the British military, Mikey Kaye.

00:45And as always, Mikey will deliver his brief as he would to his generals.

00:51So, Mikey, let's start off then with what Kaya Callas has been saying and more about these

00:56reports.

00:57Do the German and Dutch intelligence agencies that I was mentioning there, do they cite

01:02exactly which chemical weapons have been used?

01:06Yeah, they do.

01:06I'll start off by saying there are four categories, Ben, of chemical weapon.

01:10You've got choking agents, you've got blister agents, you've got blood agents and you've got

01:15nerve agents.

01:17Now, the Dutch and German intelligence report that we're looking at cites chloropicrin as one

01:23of the chemical agents being used extensively, which is falls in the choking agent part of

01:28those categories.

01:29And it goes back to its use goes back to World War One.

01:32So it's it's it's been used significantly in the past.

01:35It basically irritates the nose, the throat, the lungs.

01:38And when inhaled and used in high concentrations, it can be lethal, especially in enclosed spaces.

01:44Let's go slide. So reports indicate that Russia is using quadcopter style drones.

01:51You can see this is a quadcopter style drone on there and it's got a munition below it.

01:57And they're using sort of this style of approach to drop the chloropicrin onto Ukrainian troops

02:02in trenches.

02:03Now, the Ukrainian defense ministry say that three deaths of Ukrainian soldiers are attributable

02:09to those chemical weapons.

02:11But you've also got to look at the indirect fatalities when you're sort of assessing this

02:16capability.

02:17But when this chemical weapon is is deployed, it will effectively smoke you train Ukrainian

02:22forces out of the trenches, which then means they can be targeted by conventional weapons.

02:28So, you know, there are two aspects to the use of this.

02:30And this month alone, the UK sorry, this month, the UK contributed 400,000 pounds to the

02:36Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to enhance Ukraine's resilience against

02:42these style of attacks, both in terms of equipment, both in terms of training and in expertise.

02:47Now, this might sound like a naive question, but isn't Russia a signatory of the Chemical Weapons

02:52Convention?

02:53Yeah, no, it's not at all.

02:54Russia is.

02:55The convention came into play in 1997, and it currently has 193 state parties.

03:02Now, of note, Israel has signed it, but it's not ratified it.

03:06And Egypt, North Korea and South Sudan have not signed it.

03:09And according to the Arms Control Association, at approximately 40,000 tons of chemical weapons,

03:15Russia also possesses the largest stockpiles in the world.

03:19So, how has Ukraine, how is Ukraine responding to all this?

03:24Yeah, we were doing a bit of digging on this, and it appears through Ukrainian intelligence

03:29services targeting high-value leadership in Russia.

03:33Let's go slide.

03:35This individual is General Igor Kirilov.

03:39He was, note was, the head of the Russian military's biological and chemical weapons unit.

03:44In December 2024, Kirilov was killed, along with his deputy, during a blast in Moscow.

03:50A source inside Ukrainian security services said that they were war criminals and a legitimate

03:56target.

03:57So, I'll let you make of that what you will.

04:00Yeah.

04:00Let's just switch a little bit and talk about what the Trump administration have been saying,

04:06which is a bit of a change of policy on Ukraine, saying they are going to provide

04:10Ukraine with weapons, albeit paid for by NATO, but this includes the Patriot missile system.

04:18Yeah, it's an interesting framework.

04:20And the latest framework that's been spoke about, as you said, is NATO countries providing

04:26Ukraine with the Patriot batteries, and then the US effectively sells those NATO countries

04:32replacement Patriot battery missile systems.

04:35So, basically, NATO is paying for it, and the US defence industrial base benefits from

04:41it, which kind of, as you know, Ben, aligns to Trump's sort of transactional approach to

04:46foreign policy.

04:47Let's take a look at the Patriot missile system.

04:50Patriot actually stands for phased array tracking radar intercept on target.

04:56You can see two batteries here.

04:58Each battery carries around six to eight missile launchers capable of carrying 16 interceptors.

05:04It's long range, it can engage multiple targets, it has what's called a hit-to-kill mechanism

05:10that targets the actual warhead of the ballistic missile, which makes it effective.

05:15Let's go slide.

05:18This is a video of a Russian-caliber cruise missile launch, which the Patriot is also effective

05:24against.

05:24But the Patriot missile system does have its limitations.

05:27It's 30 minutes to set up.

05:29So, mobility-wise, it has a towing speed of just over 55 kilometres an hour.

05:34So, both these components are relatively slow in a rapidly evolving environment.

05:41So, there are limitations there.

05:42Right.

05:42So, it's not perfect.

05:43Is the Patriot, for example, effective against Russia's hypersonic missiles?

05:49Yeah, this is a good question.

05:50And for me, it's the number one question at the moment.

05:53So, hypersonic missiles can go faster than Mach 5, which is five times the speed of sound.

05:58In some cases, up to Mach 20, 20 times the speed of sound.

06:01Let's take a look at an earlier evolution of hypersonic missiles.

06:05This is a MiG-31, a Russian MiG-31 Foxbat.

06:08That big white missile strapped underneath it, you can see it's pretty huge.

06:13That's the Kinzel missile.

06:15Now, there has been a claim in 2023 that a Patriot missile battery shot down a Russian Kinzel hypersonic missile.

06:23But in terms of more developed hypersonic missiles like the Oreshnik, let's go slide.

06:28I'll show you what this looks like.

06:29It's pretty devastating.

06:31This is the Oreshnik hypersonic missile hitting Dnipro last year, last November.

06:37It actually has six warheads and six submunitions per warhead, so 36 in total.

06:43And you can see the way that it's raining down on there.

06:45It's pretty devastating.

06:47There's definitely a big question in my mind when it comes to whether Patriot can target that.

06:52Would it actually be, or to what extent, would it actually be effective against it?

06:56Now, each Patriot missile battery, so what we saw in that first slide with the tomb on there,

07:01that's about $1 billion a pop.

07:03Each missile is $3.3 million a unit per missile.

07:09So it's expensive.

07:10And there are only around $650 made a year.

07:12So if we assume that the Patriot missile system will form part of Trump's proposed Golden Dome defense missile system,

07:19and then look at all of the NATO countries and the countries outside of NATO that use the Patriot,

07:25the numbers alone in terms of how many are being made and what the demand is,

07:28I think that will impose limitations on Ukraine.

07:30Yeah, and limitations.

07:31What about drones?

07:33Because, I mean, Russia is using thousands of drones to attack Ukraine, isn't it?

07:38Is the Patriot effective against drones?

07:40So in the later models, the answer is yes.

07:43So it's pretty effective against ballistic missiles, cruise missiles.

07:46In the latest, drones are really sort of coming into it.

07:50And glide...

07:50But it's not just drones.

07:53It's glide bombs as well that need to be taken into consideration here.

07:56And basically, both the drone and glide bomb are being used to overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses.

08:02Let's take a look at some of the drones.

08:04Let's go slide, please.

08:06Great.

08:06This is a Shahed 136.

08:09It's an Iranian-made drone.

08:10It's been shot down.

08:11It's called a one-way attack uninhabited aerial vehicle.

08:16But Iran have also sold the blueprints to this drone to Russia.

08:19So Russia now make them locally as well and call them something else.

08:23The Garant 2, I think it is.

08:25This drone travels at around 120 miles an hour, which is relatively slow.

08:29Has a much lower radar section, but it is easy to shoot down.

08:34But the strategy that Putin is using on these drones is based on overwhelming with numbers.

08:39So one of these drones is effectively a hundredth of the cost of a Patriot interceptor at 3.3 million.

08:46So in June alone, Russia launched 5,000 Shahed-style drones on Ukraine.

08:515,000 in one month and over 700 in one night.

08:55So you can sort of see that the cost-exchange ratio is not just untenable, it's unrealistic.

09:00Yeah, and there wouldn't be enough Patriot missiles to deal with those thousands coming in.

09:04You mentioned glide bombs as well.

09:06And I know for the Ukrainian population, they are especially terrifying, aren't they?

09:11Yeah, absolutely.

09:12And they've been, again, they've been used extensively.

09:161,000 glide bombs were launched by Russia in just one week,

09:20which is, you know, absolutely going to overwhelm Patriot interceptors.

09:24Let's take a look at what these glide bombs are.

09:27Slide.

09:28This is a Russian Fab 3000 glide bomb being launched from a Russian jet.

09:33So you can see the jet on the top of the picture there.

09:35That's what's called a Sukhoi 34.

09:37Just below it, you can see the glide bomb.

09:39Now, that particular glide bomb, that's a 3,000 kilogram bomb or 6,600 pounds bomb.

09:45So it's big and it's got the ability to be devastating.

09:48It's very cheap.

09:49It's conventional dumb bomb, which means it's non-guided.

09:52But then when you strap a kit onto it, namely wings, which you can kind of see there,

09:58you can see some fins sticking out the back, and then you put satellite guidance on it,

10:02it becomes way more deadly because it becomes more acumen.

10:05Now, the problem with a glide bomb in terms of countering it,

10:09the glide bomb is hard to detect because it doesn't have propulsion.

10:12It's a glide bomb.

10:13And therefore, it's got no heat signature.

10:14So you're not going to pick it up thermally or it's harder.

10:16And it's also got a low radar cross section.

10:18So these are being launched by Russian jets that are sitting back from the Ukrainian enemy front lines.

10:23And they're just being tossed over into Ukraine with relative impunity, actually.

10:28Let's just stand back a bit and talk about the wider arms package that America's proposing

10:34or Donald Trump's talking about.

10:36So we've talked a lot about the Patriot missiles, but they're essentially defensive, aren't they?

10:40They're not going to win Ukraine, the war against Russia.

10:43So what else might they be hoping for or getting from the United States in terms of arms supplies?

10:49Yeah.

10:49And these are the conversations that will be going around the chiefs in Europe, in NATO.

10:53As you say, it's not just about a defensive capability.

10:55It's how do I get ahead of those attacks coming into Ukraine?

10:59So you'll remember the Atacum's deep strike surface to surface missile that was pretty much the center of conversation

11:06towards the back end of the Biden administration.

11:09It's got a range of about 300 kilometers.

11:11And Zelensky finally got approval.

11:13You remember that they were trying to get approval to use these Atacum's missiles.

11:16It finally got it in November 2024.

11:18So let's have a take a look at the Atacum slide.

11:22You can see the battery there.

11:23This is a high Mars launcher that can carry a multitude of missiles and rockets, including Atacum's.

11:29Now, this is a really interesting piece of video.

11:31You can see the high Mars launcher.

11:32You can see what looks like six green roundels.

11:35That basically, anyone looking at that on the Russian side would think that there are six rockets in there.

11:39But as this thing pops open, you can see effectively the Atacum missile coming out of it.

11:45So anyone looking at the battlefield, any Russian intelligence looking at on the battlefield,

11:49isn't able to see directly what's inside that launcher, which obviously makes it harder for them to counter.

11:57Now, why these are important, why the Atacum's missiles are important, if we go back to the glide bomb conversation,

12:01what this does is it gives Zelensky the capability to strike Russian aircraft on the ground that are being used to launch these glide bombs.

12:09However, he had them a long time ago.

12:11They haven't been replenished.

12:13And it wouldn't surprise me.

12:14And indications are that the Atacum's missile will be part of this package.

12:17So, let's get started.

Russia accused of using chemical weapons in Ukraine | BBC News

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