WSJ What’s News - Ukraine Claims Killing of Senior Russian General in Moscow

Episode Date: December 17, 2024

A.M. Edition for Dec. 17. Kyiv says it was behind a high-profile assassination in the Russian capital, its latest attempt to strike targets far from the frontlines. Plus, U.S. officials warn that Turkey could be preparing for a large-scale incursion into Syria. And WSJ correspondent Brian Spegele explains how social frustrations tied to economic malaise in China are sparking alarm among leaders in Beijing. Kate Bullivant hosts. Sign up for the WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amazon Q Business is the generative AI assistant from AWS. Because business can be slow, like wading through mud. But Amazon Q helps streamline work, so tasks like summarizing monthly results can be done in no time. Learn what Amazon Q Business can do for you at aws.com slash learn more. Ukraine claims responsibility for the assassination of a top Russian general in Moscow. Plus, US officials warn Turkey could be preparing for a large-scale incursion into Syria. And China's authorities try to rein in protests linked to Arnees over the country's sluggish economy.

Especially concerning for the government right now is that there's multiple streams of discontent at once So the government is not able to snap their fingers and fix things. It's Tuesday, December 17th I'm Kate Boulevard for the Wall Street Journal filling in for Luke Vargas and Here is the a.m. Edition of what's news the top headlines and business stories moving your world today We begin with a developing story from Russia. Ukraine says it killed a senior Russian general in an early morning bombing in Moscow, a rare targeted assassination of a high-profile military official in the capital. Russian authorities say Lieutenant General Igor Khrilov was killed outside a residential building along with his assistant after a device planted in a scooter exploded.

Krilov was head of Russia's radiological and chemical defence forces. Ukrainian officials said the killing was a special operation by the Security Service of Ukraine. Yesterday, the security service named Krilov as a suspect in an investigation of war crimes for allegedly ordering the use of banned chemical weapons in Ukraine. There was no immediate comment from Moscow on Kiev's claim of responsibility, but Russian authorities classified his death as an act of terror. Turning to the US, a New York judge has ruled that Donald Trump's hush money conviction

this year remains valid, rejecting arguments that it should be dismissed on immunity grounds. The judge found that the Supreme Court's July ruling, granting former presidents broad immunity, didn't affect Trump's state conviction, which largely involved conduct that took place before Trump began his first term in the White House. A spokesman for the president-elect said the decision violated the Supreme Court's ruling. A spokeswoman for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a Democrat whose office brought the case, declined to comment.

We're exclusively reporting that the Department of Energy's loan programs office has agreed to a record 15 billion dollar loan commitment to California utility company PG&E. The 400 billion dollar federal clean energy lending program has been stepping up efforts to push cash out the door in the weeks following the election with fears the Trump administration could curb loan efforts from the office which has faced criticism from Republican lawmakers. Journal reporter Catherine Blunt says the money is aimed at upgrading the electrical grid with an expected surge in demand tied to electric vehicles and the build-out of

AI-supporting data centers. PG&E is planning hundreds of projects that the company says are necessary to support the increase in demand and maintain grid reliability as climate change puts more stress on the system. The loan comes with a lower interest rate than traditional corporate debt, and because of that, the company expects

it will save customers about a billion dollars over time. PG&E will be able to draw funding through 2031 and pay it back using revenue collected from customers. Officials with the Loan Programs Office said that because the loan to PG&E is a legal contract, future administrations wouldn't be able to claw back the funds, though they would have oversight of what projects are funded. Environmentalists feared Trump's nominee for energy secretary fracking pioneer Chris Wright could upend clean energy

funding by the department. TikTok has asked the Supreme Court to delay enforcement of a national security law that could effectively ban the social media app in the US next month. In an emergency application, lawyers for the popular social media app asked the court to suspend the ban while they appeal a lower court ruling upholding the law, which is supposed to take effect January 19th.

According to TikTok's lawyers, putting the law on pause would prevent the silencing of its users the day before President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration and would allow the incoming administration to weigh in on the dispute. The ban won bipartisan support after lawmakers received classified briefings from the intelligence community about the threat the app could pose to national security. Senior US officials are warning that a military buildup along Turkey's border could signal it's planning a large-scale incursion into Syrian territory held by American-backed Kurds. An official in the Syrian Kurd civilian administration told President-elect Donald Trump yesterday

that a Turkish military operation appeared likely and urged him to press Turkey's president not to carry it out. Warning of mass displacement of Kurds and Christians. In his first term, Trump partially withdrew US troops from northeast Syria, paving the way for a large-scale Turkish invasion. A spokesman for Turkey's embassy in Washington didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. Canadian Finance Minister Christia Freeland has resigned from the Liberal government's cabinet, casting more doubts about how long Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's deeply unpopular government can stay in power. In a resignation letter shared on X, Freeland cited disagreements with Trudeau over the direction of Ottawa's fiscal policy amid Donald Trump's threat of a 25% tariff on imports from Canada.

Last week, Bank of Canada Governor Tiff MacLachlan said a 25% tariff would be widely disruptive for the Canadian economy, while economists believe it would trigger a recession. Trudeau named longtime ally Dominic LeBlanc as the finance minister but didn't comment on the resignation, only saying it was quote, not an easy day. Market reaction to the uncertainty in Ottawa was muted on Monday. And in other market news, shares in Alibaba traded lower today after the Chinese tech giant said it expects to book a nearly $1.3 billion loss on the sale of department store chain in time. It's the latest move by the company, once a darling of Wall Street, to move away from offline retailing and concentrate on e-commerce

amidst stiffer competition and a slowing Chinese economy. Meanwhile shares in American industrial conglomerate Honeywell are rising off hours after it said yesterday it was considering a spin-off of its aerospace unit. That comes about a month after activist investor Elliott Investment Management announced a five billion dollar stake in Honeywell and called for it to be broken up. On deck today, US retail sales data for November are due out at 8.30am Eastern with an update on industrial production coming at 9.15am and the Federal Reserve's two-day interest rate setting meeting is kicking off with a rate decision scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. Coming up, we look at the growing social unrest in China as frustrations build over the state of the country's struggling economy.

That story after the break. to Chinese leaders are racing to quash rising social frustrations and public unrest as resentment over the country's economic health spreads. The journal's senior correspondent, Brian Spiegel, says that in recent weeks China has witnessed a spate of deadly attacks, raising concerns that the country's stagnating growth has played a key role in the public protests. And Brian joins us from Beijing. Brian, can you tell us a bit more about this social unrest and how it's showing up in China? Yeah, well, I'd put it into two buckets.

On one hand, you have rising numbers of protests themselves. And so one independent monitoring group says in the last two and a half years, there's been more than 7,000 instances of public unrest. And in this year alone, there's been many more than in any other year that they've tracked recently. So in the other bucket, you also had these lone wolf attacks, which are really a new thing in China. And we've seen at least two of those in the month of November. One in the southern city of Zhuhai, a really horrific car ramming attack outside of a sports stadium that killed 35 people.

And then you also saw a mass stabbing that killed eight people in another city. Broadly speaking, the perpetrators in each of those attacks, according to police, were disgruntled with their economic situations. So it's certainly something that's very concerning for the government as many people across the country are discontent with their own economic situations. You talk about these kind of individual cases of people being disgruntled. What do these individual cases tell us about what's behind this wave of social discontent? I think especially concerning for the government right now is that there's multiple factors

at once, multiple streams of discontent at once. So the government is not able to just kind of snap their fingers and fix things. The economy is in quite a bad state right now and the government has been dealing with this for a while and they don't have a magic pill to get things back on track. And as I mentioned there's several things happening at once. On one hand you have millions literally of young people in China who are struggling to find jobs and these people are feel like they can't get their lives off the ground and they really are kind of lacking in hope. Then at the same time you have kind of middle class home buyers who may have invested their life savings in a home property that just

doesn't get built. So they're out of their money that they put into that house that they were hoping to buy. So that is on top of kind of a number of other things that are going on. And you can imagine that it's not just the migrant workers or factory workers who might be in disputes now, but it's also the middle class, it's the educated, it's even some of the elites. Okay, so it sounds like this kind of disillusionment is widespread throughout different factions of society. So what has been the response from the Communist Party to this? Yeah, certainly. You've seen a couple of things happen from the party. First of all, from

a public messaging perspective, the message from top officials to lower level officials is we need to stamp this out right now, especially the lone wolf attacks All right So we saw the Politburo in their latest discussions or their latest meetings sending very clear signals to the country saying we need stability We need social stability now at the same time I think it's important to note we've had kind of a tightening up of the information environment in China People who do have discordant views about the direction of the economy You're seeing those kinds of views wiped away from the Chinese internet, much more than you would have seen even very recently. In addition to that, when these kind of lone wolf attacks have occurred, you've seen very little

information from the Chinese government about what exactly is even going on, very brief statements from police and almost no independent news reporting on these events. So really, people are living in a black box here about what exactly is going on, which I think adds to the sense of uncertainty here. Brian, what does this social unrest mean for China and also for Xi Jinping's plans for the country? It's without a doubt a complicating factor for everything that Xi wants to achieve in China in terms of its economy. Remember, President-elect Donald Trump is getting ready to retake the White House and he is promising to take direct aim at China's economy through the imposition of tariffs. So, so much of what Xi's priority is right now is to fortify China for potentially

a period of prolonged tensions with the West. And that is a very difficult thing in and of itself to do. Now, if you have this added insecurity at home that people are saying, well, look, we're actually not necessarily fully behind the direction of the economy right now. We ourselves feel insecure. That is something that she and the rest of the government is going to have to consider as they try to roll out their own plans. That was the Journal's senior correspondent, Brian Spiegel in Beijing. Brian, thanks so much for your time. Thank you. And that's it for What's News for Tuesday morning. Our supervising producer was Daniel Bach with help from Tina Fuhr and Luke Vargas.

And I'm Kate Bulevant for the Wall Street Journal. We'll be back tonight with a new show. Until then, thanks for listening.