The man responsible for the leak of hundreds of classified Pentagon documents is reported to be a young, racist gun enthusiast who worked on a military base, and who was seeking to impress two dozen fellow members of an internet chat group.
The Washington Post interviewed a teenage member of the group, who described the man, referred to by the initials “OG”, from their online correspondence, and shared photographs and videos. The Post also viewed a video of a man identified as OG at a shooting range with a large rifle.
“He yells a series of racial and antisemitic slurs into the camera, then fires several rounds at a target,” the report said. OG told fellow members of the same internet group that he worked on a military base, which was not named in the report, where his job involved viewing large amounts of classified information.
The leaked documents have laid bare secrets about Ukraine’s preparations for a spring counter-offensive, US spying on allies such as Ukraine, South Korea and Israel, and the tensions between Washington and allied capitals over arming Kyiv.
An air alert has been declared across all of Ukraine.
Russia’s state-owned news agency Tass is reporting that authorities in Russia have identified another suspect in the explosion that killed the pro-war military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky at a St Petersburg cafe.
Quoting authorities, it writes that the attack was “prepared by a member of the Ukrainian sabotage and terrorist group, a citizen of Ukraine Yuriy Denisov, born in 1987, who, through an express delivery service through an intermediary, transferred to her in Moscow an explosive device camouflaged as a plaster bust of a military commissar.”
Tass added “the procedure for putting him on the international wanted list has been initiated.”
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Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, is grappling with a mystery ailment in jail that could be some sort of slow-acting poison, and has lost 8kg in weight in just over two weeks, his spokesperson Kira Yarmysh has said.
“We do not exclude that at this very time Alexei Navalny is being slowly poisoned, being killed slowly so that it attracts less attention,” Reuters reports Yarmysh said in a post on Twitter. “He is being held in a punishment cell with acute pain without medical help,” she said.
The US intelligence leak is also the subject of our First Edition newsletter today. My colleague Archie Bland sums up what we know so far from the leaks about major US allies:
Ukraine: US intelligence officials were pessimistic in February about Ukraine’s prospects for a new attack in the spring, saying that Kyiv could fall “well short” of recapturing territory seized by Russia. There are also details of serious air defence shortages and a risk of running out of anti-aircraft missiles completely by May.
Russia: The leaks suggest that the US has a remarkable level of insight into Russian military operations, with live information about the targets being attacked by Moscow and details of a plan to pay a bonus to soldiers who damage or destroy Nato tanks. Early this morning the New York Times reported (£) that a new batch of 27 pages shows that “the depth of the infighting inside the Russian government appears broader and deeper than previously understood”. There is also information on the Russian mercenary Wagner group’s plan to expand its operations in Haiti, as well as US use of advanced satellite imaging technology to gather intelligence on Russian forces.
UK: One document suggests that 97 special forces operatives were in Ukraine in February and March – and 50 of them were British, Harry Taylor and Manisha Ganguly report. Their purpose there is not specified, but it is suggested that the special forces could form part of a coordinated Nato group.
UN: Some documents seen by the BBC appear to describe private conversations between the UN secretary general António Guterres and his deputy about a deal to secure the export of grain from Ukraine to help tackle a global food crisis. The files reportedly suggest that the US felt Guterres was too sympathetic to Russian interests, saying that he was “undermining broader efforts to hold Moscow accountable for its actions in Ukraine”.
South Korea: Documents based in part on intercepted communications show Seoul grappling with US pressure to ship ammunition to Ukraine and concerns that artillery shells requested by Washington for its own use could end up being passed on. South Korea has a longstanding policy of not providing lethal weapons to countries at war.
Israel: Another document says that the Mossad intelligence agency encouraged its staff to take part in protests over Benjamin Netanyahu’s controversial plans to weaken the independence of the country’s judiciary. Mossad has denied those claims. There is also an assessment of scenarios in which Israel could be persuaded to provide weapons to Ukraine.
Overnight the Times of London has reported that MPs have warned that British lives have been put at risk by the leak of classified US intelligence documents. It writes:
Tobias Ellwood, [the Conservative MP] who chairs the defence select committee, said the US leaks could “endanger lives”.
“Given our long-established lead in scale and capability when it comes to elite forces it will come as no surprise that our special forces are doing much of the heavy lifting,” he said.
“But this deliberate large-scale disclosure of sensitive material could easily endanger lives and should prompt an urgent review about who has access to sensitive information and how it is shared.”
Dan Jarvis, the [opposition] Labour MP for Barnsley Central and a former special forces commander in Afghanistan, said the operations were “by necessity shrouded in secrecy”.
He added: “Any compromise of secret material regarding their deployment or numerical strength is not only politically embarrassing but also militarily disadvantageous. It risks jeopardising the security and effectiveness of those operations and could put lives at risk.”
All Ukrainian cities and Crimea must and would be part of Ukraine again, and a real peace would come by restoring the country’s borders, Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Thursday.
“There is no difference between … any Ukrainian city, they all must and will be Ukraine again,” Reuters reports he said, speaking via a video link at a Black Sea security conference in Bucharest.
Kuleba also said everyone in Ukraine was “devastated” by the “horrific” video that had emerged appearing to show Russian forces beheading a Ukrainian prisoner of war.
Suspilne, Ukraine's state broadcaster, offers this update on overnight events in Ukraine. It writes:
At night, Russian troops attacked Slovyansk in Donetsk region with S-300 missiles: the school, residential buildings and the city water canal were damaged. In the past day, one person died in the region, and two others were injured.
In the occupied Donetsk region, the Russian military has strengthened local inspections and filtering, increasing the number of checkpoints and patrols in order to hide information about the location of the Russian army, the Ukrainian general staff reported.
46 times from heavy artillery, drones and aviation, the Russian army shelled Kherson oblast yesterday: one person died, two were injured.
AFP have spoken to Vitaliy Sydor, a Ukrainian farmer who has resorted to desperate measures to clear explosives from the land himself so he can plant crops.
“I bought metal detectors and had a bit of a look on the internet,” said Sydor, 28, about his attempts to render the land usable. He had no protective equipment, he admitted, and relies on a friend with army experience.
His village, Novohryhorivka, in Ukraine’s southern Mykolaiv region, was within sight of the Russian frontline and heavily bombarded from March to November last year until the Russians retreated.
“Wherever you look there are holes,” said Sydor, indicating the shattered outbuildings and machinery.
International demining organisations and military and police sappers are out in force, but the area is vast and some farmers, needing to recoup huge losses, are taking clearance into their own hands.
“You can wait a long time. No one knows when they will come and demine everything,” said Sydor, adding that he exchanges information online with other farmers on finding munitions.
An estimated half of Mykolaiv region’s agricultural land will go unused this year “due to contamination or fear of contamination”, said Jasmine Dann, regional operations manager for demining charity the Halo Trust, which is working in the region.
Sydor’s do-it-yourself approach carries “very big risks”, she said. “There is not only the risk that something will be missed but also that the mines might be booby trapped,” she warned.“Other explosives can be very unstable and explode if tampered with.”
The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, has been holding talks in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, with the foreign minister of China, Qin Gang, alongside the foreign minister of Iran, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and minister of state for foreign affairs of Pakistan, Hina Rabbani Khar.
Russia has so far offered a muted response to the document leaks. The deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, suggested on Wednesday that the leak might be a US disinformation ploy. “Since the US is a party to the conflict and is essentially waging a hybrid war against us, it is possible that such techniques are being used to deceive their opponent, the Russian Federation,” Ryabkov told Russian news agencies.
The Ukrainian government is assessing the possible damage from the disclosures. The files give details of 12 newly formed brigades, equipped with western battle tanks and armoured vehicles, which are likely to lead the assault against dug-in Russian positions. “For sure, people are not happy,” one official admitted on Wednesday. “Ukraine was criticised last year for not being a trustworthy partner. At the beginning of the invasion, we weren’t provided with weapons because of this lack of trust. We lost a lot of territory and people as a result. This perception was wrong. And now this leakage happens from the US side.”
It was too early to say whether the leak would affect planning for Ukraine’s counter-offensive, now at an advanced stage, the official indicated. The attack is widely expected to take place in the south of the country, and possibly in the east as well. Ukraine’s goal is to break the land corridor connecting Crimea with Donetsk province and to evict the Russians from the occupied city of Melitopol and the port of Berdiansk.
The World Bank said on Wednesday it would finance $200m to help fix Ukraine’s energy and heating infrastructure, with partners and others to provide another $300m as the project expands.
The $200m grant will be used to make emergency repairs to Ukraine’s transition transformers, mobile heat boilers and other emergency critical equipment, the World Bank said in a statement.
The World Bank has mobilised more than $23bn in emergency financing for Ukraine, including commitments and pledges from donors. More than $20 billion of this has been disbursed through several projects, it said.
Energy infrastructure has suffered $11bn in damage over the last year and is one of the most critical areas where Ukraine needs urgent support, said Anna Bjerde, World Bank’s managing director of operations, on Wednesday.
During the fall and winter months, more than half of Ukraine’s power infrastructure was damaged, resulting in countrywide power outages that contributed to food, heating and water shortages, the World Bank said.
There is increasing evidence that the intelligence leak was not an intelligence operation by a state actor aiming to discredit the US, but more likely the consequence of a Pentagon policy of granting top secret security clearances to huge numbers of service members, civilians and contractors. The number of employees and contractors in the entire US government with top secret clearance is about 1.25 million.
OG appears to have acted as a leader on a server originally set up in 2020 on the Discord messaging platform by a small group of gun enthusiasts and gamers. The group went by several names, but most often it was known as Thug Shaker Central. Starting last year, OG is reported to have posted the documents on a channel on the server he named “Bear vs Pig”, a reference to the Ukraine war but also a viral video showing pigs fighting off a black bear.
According to the teenage member of the group interviewed by the Post, OG “had a dark view of the government”, portraying the government, and particularly law enforcement and the intelligence agencies, as a repressive force. He ranted about “government overreach”.
The Post said details were confirmed anonymously by other members of the group, and that it had viewed a total 300 photographs of classified documents, three times the number previously thought to be circulating.
The origins of the leaks on Thug Shaker Central was first reported on Sunday by the Bellingcat investigative journalism group, which also interviewed the same member, who is under 18.
However, the Washington Post said the teen member, who had been in touch with OG “in the past few days” had yet to be interviewed by any federal law enforcement officials by the time of publication on Wednesday night, even though the justice department began a criminal investigation and an FBI manhunt was launched at the beginning of the week. The defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, has vowed to “turn over every rock” in pursuit of the leaker.
The man responsible for the leak of hundreds of classified Pentagon documents is reported to be a young, racist gun enthusiast who worked on a military base, and who was seeking to impress two dozen fellow members of an internet chat group.
The Washington Post interviewed a teenage member of the group, who described the man, referred to by the initials “OG”, from their online correspondence, and shared photographs and videos. The Post also viewed a video of a man identified as OG at a shooting range with a large rifle.
“He yells a series of racial and antisemitic slurs into the camera, then fires several rounds at a target,” the report said. OG told fellow members of the same internet group that he worked on a military base, which was not named in the report, where his job involved viewing large amounts of classified information.
The leaked documents have laid bare secrets about Ukraine’s preparations for a spring counter-offensive, US spying on allies such as Ukraine, South Korea and Israel, and the tensions between Washington and allied capitals over arming Kyiv.
Welcome back to our live coverage of the war in Ukraine with me, Helen Sullivan.
Our top story this morning: the person who leaked US classified documents prompting a national security investigation is a gun enthusiast in his 20s who worked on a military base, the Washington Post reports, citing fellow members of an online chat group.
And the World Bank has announced it will finance $200m to make emergency repairs to Ukraine’s transition transformers, mobile heat boilers and other emergency critical equipment.
Here are the other key recent developments:
Volodymyr Zelenskiy has urged international leaders to act after a disturbing video emerged on Wednesday of Russian soldiers apparently beheading a Ukrainian prisoner of war lying on the ground. Ukraine’s president said the world could not ignore the “evil” footage, which has not been verified by the Guardian.
Belarus has extradited a Russian man who was separated from his daughter and sentenced to two years in prison after she drew anti-war pictures at school. Alexei Moskalyov, a 54-year-old single parent from the town of Yefremov, 150 miles south of Moscow, fled house arrest last month, hours before a court handed him a two-year sentence for “discrediting” the Russian army.
The EU has pledged to hold those responsible for war crimes in Ukraine to account, a spokesperson said, while the UN said it was “appalled by particularly gruesome videos” circulating on social media.
The UK government has imposed sanctions on the “financial fixers” who have allegedly helped Russian oligarchs Roman Abramovich and Alisher Usmanov hide their assets.
Britain is ready to provide an extra $500 million of loan guarantees to Ukraine, taking the total this year to $1bn, British finance minister Jeremy Hunt said on Wednesday. Hunt said the British loan guarantees had been important to underwrite a broader $15.6 billion IMF four-year package of support.
The US also imposed sanctions on more than 120 individuals and entities around the world over their ties to Russia’s war in Ukraine. The sanctions targeted people and entities across more than 20 countries and jurisdictions.
Russia has hit 333 Canadian officials and public figures with sanctions in what it said was a tit-for-tat move in response to Canada’s sanctions against Moscow and support for Ukraine.
Ukraine’s military has again rejected claims by Russia that Russian troops have captured more than 80% of the embattled city of Bakhmut. Serhiy Cherevatyi, a spokesperson for the eastern military command, insisted on Wednesday that Ukrainian forces controlled “considerably” more than 20% of it in the east.
Russia’s defence ministry has claimed its forces struck Ukrainian army reserves attempting to break through to Bakhmut. It also claimed that fighters from Russia’s private Wagner mercenary group had captured three more blocks in their attempt to seize control of the city. The claims were not verified.
Russia has tightened its conscription law, including introducing electronic military draft papers, before a widely anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive in the coming weeks. The lower and upper houses of parliament rushed through legislation that will make it significantly harder for Russians to dodge the draft while automatically banning registered conscripts from leaving the country.
Russian-installed authorities in annexed Crimea and the city of Sevastopol have cancelled traditional military parades to celebrate Victory Day and May Day, the Russian-appointed leader of Crimea has said, citing security reasons. Sergei Aksyonov’s statement on Wednesday came a day after he said Crimea was on guard and that Russian forces had built “modern, in-depth defences”.
Serbia has agreed to supply arms to Kyiv or has sent them already, according to a classified Pentagon document. Serbia is one of the only countries in Europe that has refused to sanction Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
South Korea has reportedly agreed to “lend” the US 500,000 rounds of artillery, as Seoul attempts to minimise the possibility that the ammunition could end up in Ukraine - a move that could spark domestic criticism of President Yoon Suk-yeol.
South Africa has said that an international arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin over the Ukraine war was a “spanner in the works” before a Brics summit in the country in August. The Russian president is due to attend a summit of Brics countries but the host nation is a member of the International Criminal Court and would be expected to make the arrest if Putin steps foot in the country.
The German government is very worried about the jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s worsening health condition, a government spokesperson has said. Navalny’s spokesperson on Tuesday said he had lost 8kg in 16 days while in solitary confinement, and that he was not receiving any treatment.
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2023-04-13 04:50:00Z
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