Top Russian general shot in Moscow
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The medals to mascots, ski big air to figure skating. There's a lot going on at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy. We're going to give you the lowdown of the athletes and sports to watch out for as the Games get underway. Join me, Icra, on What's in the World to hear all about it. What in the World is a daily podcast from the BBC World Service covering news and trending topics every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Find us wherever you get your BBC podcasts. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service. I'm Celia Hatton, and at 1600 GMT on Friday, the 6th of February, a top Russian general has been shot in Moscow. Vladimir Alekseev has played a significant role in the war on Ukraine, and Russia says Kiev's responsible for the attack on his life.
Meanwhile, a Ukrainian soldier who was believed to have died in the war has returned home alive. More than 30 people have been killed in a suspected suicide bombing at a Shia mosque in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad. Also in this podcast, it's the last day of election campaigning in Thailand. Our correspondent tells us why the country's progressive party is ahead in the polls, but that might not be enough.
They think by dissolving our parties, by banning our leaders from politics would make us smaller. In fact, we are getting bigger.
Let's begin in Moscow, where a top Russian general, Vladimir Alekseev, has been rushed to hospital after being shot several times. There have been a string of attacks on Russian military officials since Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine almost four years ago. This shooting took place in an apartment building in the city's suburbs. Vladimir Alekseev is the top military official to be targeted so far. He's a senior figure with Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU. Alexey has played a significant role during the war in Ukraine. Back in 2022, he took part in talks with Kiev during the Russian siege of Mariupol. A year later, he was dispatched to negotiate with the head of the Wagner mercenary group after its soldiers triggered an unsuccessful uprising against Russia's government.
Christo Grozev is head of investigations at the news website The Insider and a specialist on the Russian military and intelligence services. My colleague Tim Frank spoke with him and asked him what we know about General Alekseev.
He's probably as far, as high as anyone can go in the Russian military intelligence structure. And the loss of a general like him will be felt profoundly. He's what you might call the chief operating officer of the GRU, the Third Russian Military Intelligence Unit. And he survived several of his own commanders. And as such, he's seen by many people. as probably the most influential person in the organization, more important even than its commander, Igor Kostykov. Over the last 10 years that I've been following his career, he has been involved with absolutely every significant operation that we know of, starting from the trying to extricate and destroy the evidence of the shooting down of MH17 in 2014.
He personally never felt the need to not get his hands dirty in operations. He smuggled the book, the weapon that shot down MH17, the airliner, back in 2014. He accompanied the team that shot it down and tried to hide the evidence. He was also involved with the actual operation of the annexation of Crimea. Later, he was sanctioned over his personal involvement in supervised the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter and the murder of Don Sturgis. That was the result of that operation. More recently, he was directly involved in probably the most trusted architect of the invasion of Ukraine. Before the invasion started, he was tasked with organizing several quasi-private military companies of the like of the period Wagner so that they have the capacity to invade Ukraine.
So literally, he's been across the board on all of these operations.
You mentioned that he may even be more influential than the man who's normally his boss, General Igor Kosyukov, who's, of course, leading the Russian delegation at these negotiations with Ukraine.
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