Original subtitles

Hello and welcome to Global Eye from the BBC World Service.

I'm Jonathan Head, and this week we're in Thailand.

Coming up on the programme, we explore the shadowy world of agents helping

Ukraine hit targets deep inside Russia. Where do their loyalties truly lie?

And here in one of Asia's great megacities, I've been asking whether a

capital of more than 10 million people built barely above sea level can stay

ahead of a climate that's becoming increasingly unpredictable.

But first, we're going to take you to Ukraine. As the war there continues, a

secret battle is being fought deep inside Russia.

Two Russians working for Ukraine's intelligence services have given rare

accounts of operations they claim to have been involved in that targeted

military assets and personnel in Russia.

This investigation explores a shadow world of agents and double agents.

is shadow men russians working with ukraine

Polish journalist Marcin Mamon approached the BBC with this astonishing

access to a secret military strategy the Ukrainians were developing to target

Russia's bomber fleet with drones.

But how could Ivan's story be verified?

Marcin manages to meet Ivan in a secret location outside Russia.

Ivan agrees to talk about his work for the Ukrainian secret services as long as

his identity is hidden.

We're using an actor's voice and AI to change how he looks.

participated, but also those methods that will allow it to be dropped faster.

Our task is to find the secret place.

The point should be behind those trees.

They sent us a photo with a note on how we should find it.

It should be here.

At the detection stage, we are already using a shovel to carefully get

the contents of the package.

There are a lot of military facilities in Russia, and our work is to

identify vulnerable points.

In this frame, we see an explosive self-made device, which was made to

defeat the Russian strategic aviation.

What is this? Is this an explosive?

This is an explosive, yes. It is attached to the drone.

Here is about 700-800 grams with damaging elements.

This environment is not very safe, if we are talking about the territory of the

Russian Federation for our activities.

But at the same time, we continue to work actively.

The Russian government calls this terrorism, and most Russians would

consider them traitors.

Marchin is also following other Russians, working with the Ukrainians

from exile in Warsaw.

One man asks Marchin not to reveal his identity or his profession.

He calls himself FOMA.

He's training undercover volunteers to carry out surveillance missions in

Moscow.

Well, date of birth, age, description, there will be his car data, if he has a

car. You understand, I understand.

When you go to the object, you don't take your phone with you. I confirm.

In Moscow, the surveillance camera is your main enemy.

Because if you are caught for this work, you will be turned into 25 years of

deprivation and you will sit down as a terrorist.

We will not be able to help you with anything.

Marcin is later told by Ukrainian military intelligence that FOMA gave

them specific warnings ahead of Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022.

FOMA then had to escape, and the Ukrainians set him up in Warsaw, where

he continues to work with them.

That is, this is a full-fledged collection of data.

Where is the storage base, where is the location of the units, where do the

generals live?

In Moscow, the head of the RKBZ troops, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, was

blown up. The bomb was planted in a scooter next to his house on Ryazan

Avenue in Moscow.

It claimed over 100 drone attacks on military targets across Russia. The

media called it audacious.

Operation Spider Web is the first coordinated Ukrainian strike across all

of Russia.

Ukraine claims it destroys around a third of Russia's strategic bomber

fleet.

For a year, Ivan had been telling Marchin there would be a major attack on

strategic bombers on military airfields across Russia, though he'd never said

when or where.

The general in charge credits secret agents inside Russia.

That is, the delivery of the equipment itself,

and in our case 150 combat equipment, is, accordingly, an agent work.

Yes, yes, yes. Listen, can you somehow check it?

There is no such possibility at all.

What can you say about them?

Personally, in my operations, even big ones, this our common friend helped me

many times.

There were situations when he could not help.

And he said, I can't do everything.

That is, I have very few questions for him.

You can't say how he helped? I mean, what is there?

I can't say.

Moreover, he is not in the situation to tell anything about him.

And was he involved in the big operations that we all know about?

Maybe.

Maybe he was.

Why do you trust him?

Why are you sure that... I'm not sure.

I'm not sure at all, except for myself.

Well, me too.

I understand that there are double.

That is, he ideally wants to be with us.

By the time Marcin next meets Foma in Warsaw, it's clear that

Foma's also become obsessed with finding out whether Ivan's working for both

sides.

You found his wallet, right?

Yes.

We looked at his wallet.

We looked at his bases.

Well, what bases does he have in Russia?

We looked at how he lives, at what addresses he orders food delivery.

But this is clear to me.

He is not suspicious.

We say that it is scary, that it grinds people.

This is true.

But there is a huge amount of death in it.

If you know them or you are just lucky, you will jump through these holes and

live in this system like a mouse with a piece of cheese.

Can you tell me, during your activities and cooperation with

Ukrainians, have you completed at least one operation?

All the parts that depended on me, they were completed.

There was a hit on the targets.

But again, I participated only at a certain stage.

Ivan is out of Russia with no plans to return.

Marcin has established that both Ivan and Foma have played a part in

significant Ukrainian operations inside Russia.

Since Ivan left, Ukraine has escalated drone attacks on Russia's oil

refineries, warehouses and export hubs.

The campaign has caused some civilian deaths.

Ukraine says it's a legitimate military strategy.

The Kremlin calls it terrorism.

And you can watch the full version of Shadow Men, Russians Working with

Ukraine on BBC iPlayer or the BBC World Service YouTube channel.

Oh, my God, it's erupting. Southeast Asia is no stranger to natural

disasters.

Earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, forest fires, typhoons.

You name it, this region gets it. But climate change is making things much

worse, to the point where one day some of Asia's biggest cities may become

uninhabitable. And this one, Bangkok, could be among the most vulnerable.

Today, Bangkok is one of the world's most dynamic and cosmopolitan cities, a

capital of highways, high-rises and some very high-end shopping.

accounts for one-third of Thailand's GDP.

But the city lies in a river delta, most of it less than two metres above sea

level.

Once, it was criss-crossed by canals.

People still use them to get about.

But these days, most of them have been filled in.

So when it rains heavily, which it did recently, the water has nowhere to go.

In late September, the streets filled up.

Bangkok's legendary traffic ground to a halt as cars broke down.

And some neighborhoods were cut off without electricity for days.

The city is still recovering.

The government has had to earmark hundreds of millions of dollars in

compensation. And this could just be a taste of things to come.

Rainbow means that it's just only in Bangkok and take long time.

Bangkok is quite flat and when we have to pump, we use only the pump. We cannot

use the gravity.

Pump cannot cover the additional water that is not normal in this time.

Thailand has built some impressive infrastructure to move the annual

monsoon rains away from the capital.

Massive pumping station is one of dozens that have been constructed around the

city, carrying millions of gallons of water out to sea.

And this one actually brings it over the main road on an aqueduct. It's quite

remarkable. But no matter how many of these they build, they are still

fighting physics.

Bangkok is sinking every year and the sea levels keep rising.

So come down to the coast not far from Bangkok to this picturesque and very

peaceful temple. It's a little dilapidated now and as the camera moves

back you'll see that it is completely surrounded by water.

But just 30 years ago There were villages and fields around the temple.

In fact, you can still see the half-submerged electricity poles.

That shows you just how far the sea has advanced.

And according to some estimates, around one-third of Bangkok will be underwater

in 25 years' time.

Once you get back into the city centre, though, that apocalyptic prediction gets

much harder to imagine and you don't get much sense of urgency about it in

Thailand. Should they, for example, move the capital? After all, another

Southeast Asian country, Indonesia, has done just that, though it is still a

work in progress.

Should they build a huge sea wall?

Both of these ideas have been discussed, but rejected as too expensive, and in

the case of the sea wall, probably ineffective.

Instead, smaller, more practical ideas, mimicking nature, are being explored.

The mangrove forests that used to line much of Thailand's coast are, it turns

out, one of the best ways of fortifying it against rising sea levels.

But most have been cut down and attempts at replanting don't always work.

So here at Chulalongkorn University, they've built this...

massive tank to simulate the effects of the waves that hit the shoreline south

of Bangkok. And the idea is to see whether in places where you can't easily

regrow real mangrove forest, artificial trees might be able to do the job. This

is one of them here.

And they are really heavy.

And these will be rooted deep in the sand to hold back the tide.

And here's another way in which Bangkok's hoping that nature can help it

deal with increased flooding.

This is Benjakitti Park, a rare green space in this city and a new one that's

been landscaped out of an old tobacco monopoly complex.

But instead of lawns and playgrounds, here they've built these wetlands,

which, as well as harbouring wildlife, can also absorb a lot of water in the

rainy season, more than 100,000 cubic metres.

Other new parks have been built with reservoirs underneath them and been

designed to collect the runoff from thunderstorms. Now, these initiatives on

their own, of course, won't stop flooding. But combined with new drainage

canals and better pumping, the government's hoping they can at least

delay the reckoning that Bangkok must have with the devastating effects of our

changing climate.

As Thailand deals with the aftermath of severe flooding, Scientists are closely

monitoring a potentially record-breaking El Niño, a climate pattern caused by

unusually warm Pacific currents that could affect weather across multiple

continents. Back in 1877, one of the strongest El Niños on record caused a

series of humanitarian disasters, resulting in an estimated 50 million

deaths. The World Service's global journalism team has been exploring what

lessons that may hold.

as the world faces what might be another historic weather event.

El Niño is a naturally recurring weather pattern that has been happening for

thousands of years.

And it's here, on the coast of Peru, that it got its name.

In the 1600s, local fishermen noticed how the waters of the Pacific Ocean that

were usually cold sometimes became warmer around Christmas time.

They nicknamed this phenomenon El Niño de Navidad.

which means the boy child of Christmas in Spanish.

It wasn't until much later that scientists worked out that this was all

part of a climate pattern that takes place every two to seven years.

To understand it, we need to look at the Pacific Ocean.

Usually, strong winds push warm water towards Australia and Indonesia.

This keeps the western coast of South America cooler.

These winds are called trade winds because for centuries, Sailors relied on

them to help their ships cross the Pacific.

But every few years, these trade winds weaken or even reverse, and this allows

some of that warm water to drift back east.

This is El Niño.

Now, because Earth's climate systems are interconnected, just a bump of one or

two degrees of warmer water here is enough to affect the weather around the

world.

Every El Niño is unique, but it often brings more rain and risk of flooding

here, and brings drier conditions that increase the risk of drought.

When sea surface temperatures in the Pacific climb more than 2 degrees

Celsius above average, an El Niño can enter the category of...

So beyond the headlines, what makes an El Niño super?

So first of all, that is not a very agreed term. So there are scientists who

would be like, no, we don't name it like that, sorry, you know.

But anyway, just basically scientists or people in the community expressing that

it's one of the strongest.

Scientists have been monitoring the strength of El Niños since the mid-20th

century. But they've pieced together a record that stretches a lot further

back. In certain regions, there were ship records that were available going

back to the 1850s. And then you can also look at coral records, which allow us to

reconstruct annual temperatures going back several centuries.

From all this data, scientists think these were very severe El Niños.

The current El Niño is predicted to break these records.

That would make it stronger than the one in 1877.

when scientists think the sea temperatures could have reached as high

as 3.5 degrees Celsius above average.

That El Niño lasted more than a year. It suppressed monsoon seasons and brought

devastating droughts to multiple continents.

India, northern China, northeastern Brazil and parts of Africa were among

the worst hit by this El Niño.

An estimated 50 million people died from famine and disease.

Part of what made the 1877 El Niño so destructive was how connected the world

had become through technology like railways and steamships.

This international trade system meant that crop failures in one region of the

world became a global crisis.

This is a moment where many people around the world had to buy food in the

market.

Before that, many societies grew their own food.

In northeastern Brazil, entire communities had to migrate in search of

food and water after rainy seasons failed again and again.

Across parts of Africa, extreme swings in rainfall devastated crops and

livestock. This left many communities facing severe hunger.

In China, the drought hit a country already weakened by decades of crisis.

The Opium Wars, growing foreign influence and rising social tensions

left the Qing Empire vulnerable.

In India, many historians argue that British colonial policies made food

shortages worse.

When the harvest failed, the price of food went up. The grain that wasn't

exported out of India became too expensive for many people to buy. And

photographs of famine camps brought global attention to the crisis and led

to criticism of the British Empire.

I think initially this was a colossal, this natural event which seemed out of

the control of anyone and it was out of the control of anyone.

But gradually I think there was a really sharp critique of how governments had

failed to maintain the kinds of social insurance and social security.

Now governments, aid agencies and emergency relief organisations can

respond. far more quickly and on a much larger scale when disasters strike.

Even so, millions are still affected.

The mortality associated with El Niño events have obviously decreased over

time.

But we can learn something from these previous events that happened.

There have been major impacts on food production in many regions that continue

past those events.

El Niño is already affecting how we ship food and goods.

The Panama Canal, one of the busiest trade routes, has reduced the number of

boats that go through it because of lower water levels that are linked to El

Niño.

And our global food system is already under pressure.

But not everyone will be equally affected.

Inequality is a crucial thread that ties the 1870s to now.

What we see during the El Niños, it's not that harvest failed everywhere.

It's not that everyone was vulnerable.

Some of this is about power. It's to do with infrastructure and it's to do with

who's exposed and who's vulnerable.

Experts say that it can make the impacts of El Niño worse.

We know that this El Niño event is occurring in a warmer climate.

So the hotter it is, it tends to dry out the land more.

Also, when it does rain, that more moisture that's present in the

environment tends to wring out, and so you tend to have heavier rainfall.

Scientists are still figuring out whether a warmer world is making these

very severe El Niños happen more frequently.

But what we do know is that El Niño tends to give global temperatures a

temporary boost.

This, on top of the effects of climate change.

means 2027 is predicted to be the hottest year on record.

So how do we prepare for all this?

So even though we

can't stop El Niño, experts say what we can do is reduce its impacts.

Having that ability to forecast those events can help communities manage

disasters and provide emergency services is going to be critical for how

we adapt and be resilient to these kinds of events.

Here's some more content from the World Service this week that can help you make

sense of the world.

The What In The World podcast took a look at the political earthquake in

Serbia, where the student list protest movement toppled long-term president

Alexander Vucic in a dramatic election victory.

What In The World heard from people on the streets of Belgrade celebrating this

new era and asked what is next for Serbia.

You can catch What In The World on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your

podcasts.

Thanks for joining me in Thailand.

Global Eye will be back next week.

Goodbye.