Michael Schwirtz on Russia's Lethal Actions in Europe
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 25 January 2020
⏱️ 52 minutes
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Summary
The past few years have seen an uptick in Russian covert actions across Europe, including assassinations and attempted killings of people in Ukraine, Bulgaria, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Just this week, Bulgaria charged three Russian agents with the poisoning of a prominent Bulgarian arms manufacturer. Michael Schwirtz has been an investigative reporter with the New York Times for almost 15 years, and he's been tracking this Russian skulduggery carefully in many of those countries for much of that time. Recently, he's reported on how quite a bit of that activity is linked to one particular unit within the Russian GRU. David Priess sat down with Michael to work through this increasingly aggressive Russian action and what it all means going forward.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:14.7 | That's patreon.com slash LawFair. |
| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:33.9 | There is a single unit within the GRU that is responsible for a lot of these disruption |
| 0:38.5 | operations, including the script-out case, including the poisoning of this Bulgarian arms |
| 0:43.2 | manufacturer, the Koo and Montenegro. |
| 0:46.0 | It all leads back to one unit. |
| 0:48.6 | I'm David Prius and this is the LawFair podcast January 25th, 2020. |
| 0:55.5 | Before we get into it though, let me urge you to also check out another LawFair podcast |
| 1:00.4 | feed, the one for our audio narrative, the report, which we are now using to bring you |
| 1:05.9 | a distilled version of the president's impeachment trial. |
| 1:09.6 | Just the core arguments, without the punditry, the repetition, the breaks, the milk drinking, |
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| 1:21.9 | It's called the impeachment and you can find it wherever you find podcasts, just search |
| 1:26.6 | for the report. |
| 1:29.7 | On this episode, the past few years have seen an uptick in Russian covert actions across |
| 1:35.0 | Europe, including assassinations and attempted killings of people in Ukraine, Bulgaria, Germany, |
| 1:42.1 | and the United Kingdom. |
| 1:43.8 | Just this week, Bulgaria charged three Russian agents with the poisoning of a prominent |
| 1:48.6 | Bulgarian arms manufacturer. |
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