December 17, 2024

Welcome to this Tuesday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston and Meghann Myers. Share your newsletter tips, reading recommendations, or feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here.

Russian general dead in Moscow

The general in charge of Russia’s nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons was killed outside his apartment building in Moscow on Tuesday. His name was Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, and he reportedly perished along with a close aide after an apparent bomb hidden inside a scooter detonated as he was heading to work.

A Ukrainian official took credit for the attack, calling Kirillov a “war criminal and an entirely legitimate target,” according to the Associated Press and the Financial Times. On Monday, “Ukraine’s Security Service, or SBU, opened a criminal investigation against [Kirillov], accusing him of directing the use of banned chemical weapons” by dropping them via drones inside trenches along the front lines, AP reports.

“The scooter with explosives was placed at the entrance around 4:00 am, and the explosives were detonated via radio signal,” Rob Lee of the Foreign Policy Research Institute reports. Alleged video of the incident was shared with FT’s Chris Miller, who posted it to social media Tuesday morning, here.

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Developing: Ukraine special operations troops say they killed more than four dozen North Korean soldiers over a three-day period inside occupied Kursk, Russia. Another 47 were allegedly injured in the attacks, which hit “two armored vehicles, two cars and one enemy ATV,” according to Ukraine’s 8th Separate Special Operations Regiment, writing Tuesday on Telegram.

White House reax: “I don't know that we have an exact number, but we do believe that they [North Korea] have suffered some significant losses, killed and wounded,” White House National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby told reporters Monday afternoon. “Certainly in the realm of dozens, several dozens,” he continued, and said, “and we're just now starting to see this movement of them from the second line to the front line. So it's a fairly new development.”

Update: President-elect Donald Trump said Monday that he will push Ukraine to negotiate with Russia for a ceasefire after he takes office next month.

Trump was asked at a press conference if he would ask Ukraine to give up territory Russia invaded and occupies as part of that ceasefire. “I'm going to let you know that after I have my first meeting,” he said in a meandering reply. “But a lot of that territory, when you look at what's happened to those—I mean, there are cities that there's not a building standing. It's a demolition site. There's not a building standing, so people can't go back to those cities. There's nothing there. It's just rubble.”

However, according to one Ukrainian lawmaker, “I cannot imagine a person in the parliament voting for giving up any other territories, because it's not about territories. This is people,” Oleksandra Ustinova, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, told reporters in Washington on Friday. “And this stuff has been promised. This stuff needs to be delivered. If it's not delivered, and we do not come back with a stronger position. It's going to be very difficult,” Ustinova said.

What’s more (or less), Ukrainian officials have said their country has received less than half of the total military aid that the United States has promised, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reports. Getting that aid, especially long-range missiles, would allow cross-border strikes that could ward off Russian attacks, Tucker writes.

But ceasefire or no, Russia is likely to remain aggressive toward Ukraine and other Eastern European countries until handed battlefield defeat, Ustinova said Friday. “The only thing for them to stop the war is to start losing operations. A great example of that would be Kursk,” she said. Read on, here.

Related reading: “How China is adopting battlefield lessons from Ukraine,” according to researcher Tye Graham of BluePath Labs and New America futurist Peter W. Singer, writing Monday in Defense One.

Syria’s uncertain future

British, French, and German diplomats are in Damascus meeting with Syria’s new leadership. Germany brings with it “to create stability in the country, support reconstruction and enable the safe return of refugees,” Berlin’s Foreign Ministry announced Monday.

Official British reax: “We want to see a representative government, an inclusive government” in Syria, Foreign Secretary David Lammy said in a statement. “We want to see chemical weapons stockpiles secured, and not used, and we want to ensure that there is not continuing violence. For all of those reasons, using all the channels that we have available, and those are diplomatic and of course intelligence-led channels, we seek to deal with HTS where we have to,” said Lammy. The BBC has more.

For the first time in nearly 13 years, France raised its flag at the embassy in Damascus on Tuesday. However, according to Reuters, “French diplomats say they want to see how [the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham] approaches the transition before making big decisions such as on sanctions, the lifting of the designation of HTS as a terrorist group and ultimately providing financial support for Syria.”

The U.S. has been in touch with Syria’s new leaders, State Secretary Antony Blinken said over the weekend during a trip to Jordan—just a few days after talks with Turkish officials in Ankara. And the European Union’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said Monday that she’s sent a representative to Damascus to establish ties as well.

ICYMI: HTS’s leader has changed his name. It was Mohammed al-Golani

(alternate spellings include Jolani, Jawlani, and others). He has now reverted back to his birth name, which is Ahmed al-Shara. He spoke to the UK’s Times this week to share some of his requests for the wider Western world, including his insistence that the U.S. and others “lift all restrictions” (or sanctions) on Syria because “the flogger is gone now,” he said. “This issue is not up for negotiation,” he told the Times. He also wants HTS’s terrorist designation dropped. Read on, here.

Also: The EU just announced “An extra €1 billion for 2024 is on its way to support Türkiye’s efforts to host Syrian refugees,” EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Tuesday from Ankara, adding, “Our economic relationship is growing stronger every year.”

Reminder: “Turkey is hosting nearly three million refugees who fled across the border in search of safety after the civil war began in 2011,” Agence France-Presse reports, and notes, “Ankara is hoping the shift in power in Damascus will allow many of them to return home.”

The U.S. military says it killed at least a dozen ISIS militants after a wave of airstrikes at unspecified “former Regime and Russian controlled areas” of Syria on Monday.

Official line: “The strikes against the ISIS leaders, operatives, and camps were conducted as part of the ongoing mission to disrupt, degrade, and defeat ISIS, preventing the terrorist group from conducting external operations and to ensure that ISIS does not seek opportunities to reconstitute in central Syria,” Central Command said in a statement Monday.

Worth noting: “ISIS has tripled its operational tempo in Syria compared to 2023 while expanding its geographic reach, increasing recruitment and attack scale and sophistication,” Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute wrote Monday.

But perhaps more urgently, if the U.S. can’t forge some kind of agreement with Turkey in the coming weeks, the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces’ “days will be numbered—and the U.S. will need to consider withdrawing from Syria,” Lister predicts.

A second opinion: “To reach a solid deal, the United States must abandon the limited SDF project for a wider perspective toward all of Syria,” Ömer Özkizilcik wrote for the Atlantic Council on Tuesday. “While Turkey has become the most influential foreign actor in Syria, the United States still maintains significant leverage over the international legitimacy of the new Syrian government and funding for the country’s reconstruction.”

The U.S. will likely need to present Turkey with some incentives for cooperation, Lister advises, with some of the more obvious options including F-35s or additional F-16 sales to Ankara, agreeing to help remove Kurdish YPG fighters from Syria’s border with Turkey, formally recognizing the new rebel leaders of Syria, among other possibilities. Read more in Lister’s recent op-ed published Sunday in the New York Times, here.

Around the Defense Department

Marines will spend nearly $1B to develop littoral warfighting, upgrade tactical systems. That’s $715 million to design and test its new littoral warfighting systems, and $269 million for a secretive project to upgrade the service’s tactical systems to better integrate across agencies. The two five-year research and development contracts, totalling roughly $1 billion, went to technology solutions company ManTech. Defense One’s Meghann Myers reports, here.

Update: The U.S. Army can continue on with a $990 million Switchblade loitering munitions contract awarded to AeroVironment in August. Following a weekslong review, the Government Accountability Office denied a protest filed in September by Mistral, a GAO spokesperson confirmed Monday. The Army temporarily stopped work on the contract following the filing.

Additional reading:

“Several Pentagon commands failed to keep good track of classified mobile devices, audit finds,” Nextgov/FCW reports off a heavily redacted DOD IG report.
“SECNAV Del Toro Names Future Guided Missile Frigate USS Joy Bright Hancock (FFG 69),” the Navy announced Monday.

Pacific region

Marines start moving from Okinawa to Guam. According to AP, “Under the plan agreed between Tokyo and Washington in April 2012, about 9,000 of the 19,000 Marines currently stationed on Okinawa are to be moved out of Okinawa, including about 4,000 of them to be moved to Guam in phases. Details, including the size and timing of the next transfer, were not immediately released.”

Some 100 members of III Marine Expeditionary Force have now moved from the Japanese island to the American one for initial logistics work, the Marine Corps and Japan’s Defense Ministry said in a joint statement. More, here.

Navies pursue deep-diving drones. Wall Street Journal: “The new underwater drones, with names such as Ghost Shark, Herne and Manta Ray, can typically dive thousands of feet below the surface and operate largely without human interaction for days on end. That ability makes them ideally suited to gather intelligence, protect undersea infrastructure and counter potential threats in the Pacific.” More, here.

Philippines, Japan launch troop-access pact. On Monday, the Philippine Senate on Monday ratified a reciprocal access agreement with Japan that allows each to send military forces to each other’s territory. It’s the first such agreement that Tokyo has signed with another Asian country, though it has them with Australia, Britain, and of course, the United States. The agreement “will ease the entry of equipment and troops for combat training and disaster response, smoothing military cooperation between Manila and Tokyo,” as Reuters put it, here.

Trump 2.0

Trump's transition team plans to arrive at the Pentagon on Monday, according to Reuters. That’s later than an incoming administration usually starts moving in; the president-elect's team was reticent to sign the agreements required for access before Inauguration Day. They had, among other things, suggested skipping the background checks routinely used to protect secret and sensitive information, as GovExec reported earlier this month.

Hegseth’s bodyguard left the Army after the beating of a civilian. According to the New York Times reporting Monday: when Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick for defense secretary, “visited senators on Capitol Hill this month in an effort to show that he has the qualifications and judgment to lead the Defense Department,” he was escorted by John Jacob Hasenbein, a former Army Special Forces master sergeant.

Hasenbein “left the military after a 2019 training event in which witnesses said he beat a civilian role player—kicking him, punching him and leaving him hogtied in a pool of his own blood,” the Times reports. Hasenbein was charged and convicted, but the jury verdict was overturned when a judge declared a mistrial because a friend of Hasenbein’s had been talking to a juror. Read on, here.

Related reading: