[music]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We've mentioned on this show, but we haven't really talked in any detail yet about an American journalist being detained by Russia a couple of weeks ago for the first time since 1986, since the depths of the Cold War that an American has been detained reporting for a news organization in Russia.

Between the Trump indictment and the abortion pill rulings and mass shootings followed by expulsion of the Tennessee lawmakers protesting mass shootings and the wave of anti-trans laws getting passed at the same time, there has been such a crush of urgent-seeming justice stories in this country, we haven't gotten yet to really dig into the plight of 31-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.

We will try to rectify that now with Julia Ioffe, founding partner and Washington correspondent for Puck News, a Russia-born US-based journalist herself. Julia writes that there is something uniquely stomach-turning about the arrest of this US citizen of Soviet-Jewish extraction. Her article is called The Abduction of Evan Gershkovich. We'll also get Julia's take on the US intelligence document leak that could have implications for the war in Ukraine. Julia, always good to have you on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Julia Ioffe: Oh, thank you so much for having me, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Let me play a clip of Evan Gershkovich to start out just so our listeners have a sense of him, at least for 30 seconds, as not just an abstraction but a human being and a journalist. Here is about 30 seconds of him talking last summer on a trip to Siberia.

Evan Gershkovich: When I was in Kazakhstan, I spoke with a lawmaker, and he invoked this Siberian fairytale. The story goes that a bear and this chipmunk were friends. One day, this bear was in a really good mood, and it tries to pat the chipmunk on the back, but it still has claws, and it scratched the chipmunk. That's why chipmunks now have these three stripes on their backs. This parliamentarian's point was that Kazakhstan will be friends with Russia, but it's still a bear, and they need to watch their backs.

Brian Lehrer: "And they need to watch their backs." To correct myself, talking about a trip to Kazakhstan but a Siberian fairytale, Evan Gershkovich from the Wall Street Journal posts. Julia, the Russian government says arrested or detained, you say abducted. Why do you use that word?

Julia Ioffe: Because we've seen Russia in the past, just as they have with Brittney Griner, with Paul Whelan, banking prisoners. As Andrei Soldatov, who was a very well-known chronicler and reporter on the Russian security services, on the FSB in particular, has said that, like regimes like Iran, for example, Moscow has been purposely taking American citizens into its custody in order to then play a trading game with them.

It's basically using them as pawns, as chits to spring out people they want released from American or Western jails, people who are FSB operatives or GRU operatives or people like the arms trader Viktor Bout, who was exchanged in December for Brittney Griner. Basically, these are not legitimate arrests, these are-- Again, it's just the banking of hostages, as Soldatov has said.

Brian Lehrer: It's almost like the clip of Evan Gershkovich talking about Kazakhstan that we just played, where, yes, in theory, they have this kind of friendly country, bilateral relationship, but really, Russia, the bear in that Siberian fantasy he was describing, that analogy, that metaphor, the bear, Russia, is really looking over Kazakhstan's shoulder, and if they do anything wrong, Russia is going to come down on them. It's kind of the same way with Russia and foreign journalists?

Julia Ioffe: Well, I would challenge that because I don't think there is anything friendly or even anything that could be perceived or mistaken as friendliness. I think Russia has been quite hostile to foreign reporters for a long time. I think Evan and other American reporters who have been in and out of the country since the war began have been extremely brave, but that country has been a hostile environment for Russian reporters for a very long time.

American and foreign journalists were largely spared that because they were protected by their foreign passports. Russia didn't seem to want international incidents resulting from the imprisonment of a foreign journalist or if any physical harm came to them the way it did to so many of our Russian colleagues, but they tolerated them at best and used them as window dressing for the rest of the world to say, "Look, we allow journalists to come in. We allow journalists to come in and report," but after the war broke out, all of those rules were off.

It was very clear that their hostility that they had been trying to keep in check was just going to come pouring out now and that it was only a matter of time until something like what happened to Evan would happen. I would say that there was no love lost, no friendliness, not even a grudging alliance. They were quite hostile to all reporters from the very beginning.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, but they hadn't arrested a US-born journalist, so there was a little bit of laissez-faire at the very least since, as your article reminds us, the depths of the Cold War in 1986. You're linking this to the war in Ukraine. What do you think Russia gets as an advantage in the war, its invasion of Ukraine, by arresting this journalist?

Julia Ioffe: Again, it was not laissez-faire at all. Russia had, in the last decade, really tightened its rules for accrediting journalists. It let in fewer foreign journalists than it had before, and that was very much on purpose because it didn't want to be reported on, like all authoritarian regimes.

Brian Lehrer: Fair enough.

Julia Ioffe: Restricting access is not really-- If your bar is or your standard is not arresting somebody, that's very low, but as for [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: Right. I stand corrected on that point, to be sure. Go ahead.

Julia Ioffe: As for the war in Ukraine, it's not so much that they hope to get anything in the war from Evan's arrest, it's that the gloves are off. Before, they cared about some kind of international opprobrium, especially in the West, which was still where Russia was mostly focused. This alliance with China is not one that they really want to make. Russia and its government is a pretty racist place.

They look down on the Chinese, they want to be considered European, they want to sit with the Europeans, and so they were still afraid that there would be some kind of opprobrium, some kind of international scandal, but once the war broke out, once Russia invaded Ukraine full-scale, and once the West came down so hard on Russia in terms of sanctions, kicking Russia and Russians out of so many international bodies, there was a sense in Moscow that, "Well, we have nothing left to lose, and frankly, we don't care. These people hate us, they're completely unreasonable."

The last straw for so many people in government circles in Moscow was the ICC's arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin. They felt that that was just beyond the pale and that they didn't have to care anymore about the West's reaction, so they could arrest whoever they wanted. Furthermore, if you have a high-value-- What they've learned from the Brittney Griner case is that if you take an American that is considered valuable in American society, like a pro athlete or a journalist, somebody who comes from a respected category in America, then they can get a good trade for it.

As we know, also since Putin invaded Ukraine in February of 2022, Western powers have been kicking out Russian "diplomats" at fantastic rates. These are not actual diplomats, these are Russian secret service operators or spies operating under diplomatic cover, have been kicking them out or arresting them, and so there are now a lot of Russian spies that are sitting in Western jails, and the Russian spy network in Europe has been decimated. Taking somebody like Evan, they might get somebody out, if they release him. That's really what it comes down to.

Brian Lehrer: Trade bait. I've been saying the name. By the way, correct me if my pronunciation was wrong. I thought I saw on an authoritative website, somebody calling him Gershkovich or Gerishkovich like I've been saying. Some people say Gershkovich. Do you know what's the most accurate?

Julia Ioffe: I think it's the former, Gershkovich. I think it depends if you say [unintelligible 00:10:59], but I'm sure it's fine.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Listeners, your thoughts and questions welcome on the detention of Evan Gershkovich or the leaked US intelligence documents which we'll get to or maybe the relationship of either of those things to the war in Ukraine for Julia Ioffe, Washington correspondent for Puck News. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. We will watch our mentions go by on Twitter.

Julia, among the reasons, you find this arrest uniquely stomach-turning, as you write, is that he was out in the Russian provinces reporting on a private military company called Wagner. What's Wagner and why is reporting on it important?

Julia Ioffe: Well, I have no idea. Wagner is a "private military company." It's what the Kremlin thinks Blackwater was to the US. Wagner, unlike Blackwater, takes its command and gets all its weaponry, all of its supplies from the Russian Defense Ministry. It is an arm of the Russian government. Before the war in Ukraine, it allowed Russia to operate with some kind of plausible deniability in places where the Kremlin wanted to exert its influence but remain out of the headlines so places like the Central African Republic, in Libya, in Syria, et cetera.

In Ukraine, since the start of the war, Wagner was thrown in because they were more seasoned, more experienced fighters than the Russian army, in part because of their experience fighting in the Donbas in eastern Ukraine from 2014 to 2022, in Syria, in Libya, et cetera. Then they became just over the course of the war, as Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner of Wagner private military company, he has filled its ranks with tens of thousands of Russian prisoners, and they have become basically the cheap supply of cannon fodder for the Russian war in Ukraine. [crosstalk] Yes, go ahead.

Brian Lehrer: You describe the owner of Wagner as cartoonishly cruel.

Julia Ioffe: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Why is that?

Julia Ioffe: Oh my goodness, he is-- Well, first of all, let's just say that the trademark of Wagner has become a sledgehammer, and it is gifted to, for example, Russian Members of Parliament who are perceived as friendly or extra supportive of Wagner. The reason it's a sledgehammer is because this is their favorite way of executing traitors or deserters. They tape their heads to a cinderblock and then they smash their head in with a sledgehammer, usually on video, which they then disseminate through their Telegram channels in order to dissuade others from becoming turncoats. There's something very ISIS-like about that.

Even before the war, Prigozhin was known to do insane things, like he had hired a chemist who walked around Saint Petersburg and Moscow and also would turn up in places like Syria with some goons, the kind of security guys, and he would just stab people with a syringe full of poison.

Brian Lehrer: Whoa.

Julia Ioffe: Journalists, activists, people that Wagner wanted to get rid of. It's things like that. He dispatched with his chief competitor in the catering business about 20 years ago in Saint Petersburg by poisoning the food that his competitor served at a banquet so that all these Russian bureaucrats and officials got sick at banquet, ambulances had to be called, and so they never use that man's catering company again and turn to Prigozhin. These are the kinds of things he resorts to.

Brian Lehrer: Evan Gershkovich must have been courageous in the first place to be a journalist in Russia, reporting on a Russian military contractor no less known for killing journalists.

Julia Ioffe: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: That's something that a lot of people may not know about Evan Gershkovich beyond the fact that he was apparently detained without any justification. You quote a really ghoulish comment that Prigozhin made after Gershkovich's arrest.

Julia Ioffe: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Care to repeat it?

Julia Ioffe: He said basically, "Well, I don't know where he is, but if you like, I can check some of the freshly dug graves in my cemeteries and my interrogation cellars for him."

Brian Lehrer: No need for him to be subtle at all, apparently.

Julia Ioffe: No, he is not. A man who gifts sledgehammers to people as gifts is not a subtle man, but I do want to say that Evan reporting on Wagner was incredibly important because Wagner, from the very beginning of its existence, drafted people from the Russian provinces where people had no work, where people were up to their ears in debt and loans that they had trouble paying back. He would show up and offer a very tantalizing financial package and recruited these men from very economically depressed regions, offering their families payouts if their loved one was killed, payouts that often didn't appear.

He has recruited tens of thousands of Russian prisoners straight from Russian jails. Again, Wagner has been crucial, very important in the fight for Ukraine. Prigozhin himself has been clearly angling for more political power inside the Russian system. It's an incredibly important story, and the fact that Evan was reporting on it shows just his acumen as a journalist, like he knew what the story was, and he went for it despite the risks. Unfortunately, we know what happened after that.

Brian Lehrer: We're talking with Julia Ioffe from Puck News. Her article The Abduction of Evan Gershkovich. If you're just joining us, Evan Gershkovich, The Wall Street Journal reporter who was detained by Russia several weeks ago and is still being held. Julia, like you, Evan Gershkovich is of Soviet-Jewish descent. Would you tell a little of his family story?

Julia Ioffe: Well, his family were Soviet-Jewish refugees to the US, and he was born after his parents moved to the US. He grew up speaking Russian in the home, and it is part of what got him into reporting about Russia and studying Russian culture, Russian history. I very much relate to that story. I also can only imagine what his parents and family members are going through, because whenever I went to Russia, my parents were worried sick. They hated that I was back there. They hated that I was interested in this horrible place.

This place that they did everything they could to get out of to give us a different future to make sure that we didn't grow up in that terrible place with a cursed history and a penchant for cruel authoritarianism. To do all that and then have your kid go back and be swallowed up by this place that you did everything you could to get out of, to give your kids a different future. I know that was my parents' biggest fear when I went to Russia. I can only imagine that extra level of suffering that his family must be going through right now and my heart breaks for them.

Brian Lehrer: I guess you can't speak for him, but speaking for yourself, why did you get so interested in reporting on Russia rather than just, as you suggest, your family might have liked just staying away from it?

Julia Ioffe: Because you grow up hearing about the history, you grow up with the culture, reading the books, and then you get curious and you want to know more. Then it turns out the story is even more complicated and richer and more insane than you ever would've thought. I mean, it's addictive. For me, for example, I decided to not be a pre-med in college anymore because I took Stephen Kotkin's Soviet history class, and I realized this was the most incredible story in the world, there was no story like it. The Soviet experiment was probably the craziest thing humans have ever done on this planet.

You also have, like Evan, you have the tools, you have the language and you have this innate understanding of the culture, something like the beginnings of it that gives you a special kind of aperture that others may not have. Because of that personal connection also, it becomes that much more fascinating. When you read about these wild historical events that beggar the imagination, you have family members that live through it, so it means that much more. You read about the purges and you're like, "Oh, yes, so and so in my family was arrested in 1937 and disappeared," or World War II when 27 million Soviets were killed pushing back Nazi Germany.

That's 15% of the Soviet population lost in four years. You know that, if you count, go through the family, two dozen people that were killed in that struggle. Again, it just takes on a much more urgent and personal meaning.

Brian Lehrer: You can communicate it, because I'm not familiar with Evan's work, but I can say from reading you for some time now that I guess everything you just described is part of why your reporting on Russia and on the region is so incredibly valuable.

Julia Ioffe: Well, thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think there is anti-Semitism involved here like just plain hatred of Jews on the part of the Russian authorities or some political use of a journalist of Soviet-Jewish descent in particular for some kind of political advantage?

Julia Ioffe: I think what it is, is that in the minds of, say the foreign ministry and the Kremlin, people like me, people like Evan Gershkovich, people like Masha Gessen were particularly galling to them because we are from the place. We then left the place and went over to the side of the enemy, i.e., the United States. Then we're using that perch, that passport, et cetera, as well as our innate understanding of the place that we came from to in their minds libel and defame our motherland. That to them was a special kind of betrayal that really infuriated them. This was something I heard talked about.

Word would get back to me that there was just a special kind of loathing reserved for people like us because we were seen as a special kind of traitor. Moreover, ironically for a country that continues to slam Ukraine as full of Nazis, Russia is an incredibly anti-Semitic place and has always been. The seat of that is often the special services, the FSB, the GRU. These are people who really don't like Jews. The KGB, for example, stopped taking Jews. You could not be in the foreign ministry. You could not be in the KGB in Soviet times. If you were Jewish, you were considered not politically reliable. It's that anti-Semitic trope of dual loyalty. It's on one hand just anti-Semitism.

On the other hand, it's that we always suspected you Jews, that you were disloyal to Russia, that your home was always somewhere else, the Wandering Jew archetype. Then you've proven us right by defecting to the Americans and then using your language, using your cultural understanding to libel the motherland. Again, there's a special hatred and loathing reserved for people like Evan because we're seen as traitors.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Julia Ioffe from Puck News, more on the abduction of Evan Gershkovich, Wall Street Journal reporter in Russia. We'll also get into the leak of the US classified or intelligence documents that has come to light in recent days. Julia spoke to the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner, about that. Maybe these two stories relate in some way. Maybe they both relate to the war in Ukraine in some way. We will get into that, and we'll take some of your phone calls for her. 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692.

[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Julia Ioffe, Washington correspondent and founding partner of Puck News, talking about the Evan Gershkovich arrest or detention or abduction, as she calls it in her article, in Russia. Let's see, can I go to Robert on line 4 who says he grew up with Evan? Here we go. Robert, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Robert: Yes, thank you, Brian. I appreciate you taking my call. Thank you very much for talking about Evan. I grew up with him, like I said, and I just wanted to give a shout-out to GoFundMe page, that is, all the proceeds raised are directed to Evan's family to put towards efforts to bring Evan home, expenses to the family, and to further dedicate to causes that are meaningful to him and his family. The page is called Free Evan Gershkovich. If you Google it and Google it with GoFundMe, it will come up. Thanks again for talking about this.

Brian Lehrer: Robert, thank you. Julia, I see that the Wall Street Journal has put out on the web ways that readers can support Evan Gershkovich on social media, not necessarily with money as Robert is bringing up for his family, but in addition to that, there are various tags and symbols and things you can put on your Twitter feed or whatever. Can that kind of public response matter in a case like this, do you think?

Julia Ioffe: Oh, it's-- First of all, thank you, Robert, for shouting out the GoFundMe page, and my heart goes out to you. I know it must be incredibly tough for Evan's friends and family right now. As for public attention, it's a very fine and difficult line to walk because on one hand you need to keep this person's detention and survival in the news. You need people to talk about it. You need him to be important enough to say the White House and the State Department to do all that they can to get him out. That kind of public pressure does mean something because we live in a democracy where public pressure means something.

Unfortunately, in Russia, that public pressure just raises the value of the prisoner and makes or allows the Kremlin to ask for increasingly brazen trades or asks for releasing the person that they have abducted and taken hostage. On one hand, the pressure at home is important to keep our government's eye on the ball and to make sure they are not distracted and that they're doing everything they can to bring somebody like Evan or Brittney Griner home. Again, on the other hand, it raises their price.

Unfortunately, that is how they see it. With Brittney Griner, all the attention around her is in part what got somebody like Viktor Bout out. Brittney Griner is a professional athlete who had a vape cartridge that she used to medicate muscle aches and body pains that come with being an athlete and putting your body through a lot. In part because of all the public outcry and public pressure in the US, she was traded in an incredibly lopsided and horrific trade for Viktor Bout who was called the merchant of death, who sold arms that fueled often both sides of really horrific bloody conflict in Africa and Asia, et cetera.

Brian Lehrer: Now here we go again.

Julia Ioffe: Yes, but at the same time, is it good that Brittney Griner was brought home? Absolutely. Do we want to do everything in our power to bring home Evan and Paul Whelan? Absolutely. It's just a very, very difficult line to walk, and frankly, I don't know how to walk it. I don't know that we have a good solution. It's very hard to game a crazy, authoritarian dictatorship that is bent on doing everything in their power to undermine us, to hurt us, et cetera. It's hard to game that.

Brian Lehrer: On how the Biden administration is walking that line, here's a nine-second clip of Biden answering a reporter's question on Gershkovich on March 30th.

Reporter: What's your message to Russia right now as they're detaining--

President Biden: To who?

Reporter: To Russia as they're detaining this Wall Street Journal reporter?

President Biden: Let him go. We're in process.

Brian Lehrer: March 31st actually, Joe Biden. On the 30th, his press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre also talked about the case.

Karine Jean-Pierre: These espionage charges are ridiculous. The targeting of American citizens by Russian government is unacceptable. We condemn the detention of Mr. Gershkovich in the strongest terms. We also condemn the Russian government's continued targeting and repression of journalists.

Brian Lehrer: How's the Biden administration doing or what is the Biden administration doing?

Julia Ioffe: Well, we know that the Biden administration is trying to provide Evan with consular services which the Russian government has so far denied him. We know that the Biden administration designated Evan as wrongfully detained, which unlocks a lot of government resources and speeds up certain processes in Washington for the government to really step on the gas in trying to release him. We know that there are conversations happening with Russian counterparts. We know that Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke about this with Sergey Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister.

Unfortunately, at a time like this when there is almost zero communication between Washington and Moscow, when Moscow is clearly not in the mood to play nice or even make any kind of deal with the US-- I remember in the early days of the Brittney Griner detention, my sources in the White House telling me they were trying but that the Russians just didn't care, and they were in no mood to talk, let alone make a deal. They were too angry at the US for uniting the world against them.

Again, the problem is that when you have a situation like this, the party that doesn't want it is the one that drives the process, and that party right now is Russia. They are happy to let this play out. I'm sure that they're going to have a trial in secret for Evan where no press is allowed, where we don't see the evidence against him. I use evidence very loosely because there is no evidence. Evan was clearly just doing his job, and these charges are bogus, but I know they will trial him in secret. They will slap him with an absolutely insane sentence. He now faces 20 years in jail. I'm sure they will give him something very close to that like 17, 18 years and then they will maybe start talking.

Then they'll ask for something crazy. I know with the Brittney Griner and Viktor Bout exchange, the Kremlin asked-- it said, "Look, we're only doing one for one trades, and if you want Paul Whelan out, you have to give us this FSB operative that's in jail in Germany. This man killed somebody in a German park, in a Berlin park, in broad daylight at 2:00 PM in the afternoon, was caught, was sentenced to life in prison in Germany, and they said, "Get the Germans to hand over the FSB guy and Paul Whelan can go home."

Obviously, the US government can't ask another sovereign government to suspend their judicial process and just let somebody out because an American citizen is being held because we wouldn't want somebody to make that ask of us. They'll make some kind of crazy ask, I'm sure, in the Evan case, and when the US inevitably box, they'll say, "Fine. We'll just keep him in jail. He is a spy." Unfortunately, for Evan, I think this is going to drag out for a long time, and he is going to be in jail in horrific, horrific conditions for a long time.

Brian Lehrer: Listener tweets, "How do the people of Russia on mass feel about their authoritarian culture? Do they accept it or are they brainwashed?" I guess that's one way to pose the question.

Julia Ioffe: Well, I think they're related. I do think a lot of people accept it. It's hard to say if they accept it enthusiastically, probably not. I think there's a lot of fatalism in Russia, there's a lot of this sense of, "Well, what can we do?" That is why authoritarian regimes atomize their population and make everybody who's unhappy with the regime feel like they're the only one, that there's nobody else who feels like them because everybody else is too scared to speak up.

There's a lot of fear in Russia right now and also a lot of rally around the flag patriotism. Putin has managed to convince many, many Russians that the whole world is against them, that if Russia loses in Ukraine, Russia will cease to exist both as a country and a civilization, and that even if they were against the war to begin with, they're for the war now because they're fighting for their own survival. That is not a very enthusiastic ideology. It's a kind of grudging acceptance, fear, that they will be targeted by their government and also by the rest of the world, so yes, it's this kind of survivalist fatalism.

Brian Lehrer: We have a caller. I'm not going to put him on the air, but he's saying the kind of investigative reporting that you were describing Evan is doing, like on that military contractor, how different is that from espionage, trying to reveal military-related secrets of a foreign power that we consider our enemy?

Julia Ioffe: Well, Wagner is not exactly a secret. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head and owner Wagner, trumpets the fact that he is the owner of Wagner. He trumpets what Wagner is doing on the battlefield. He trumpets the fact that he was behind the troll farm and some of the attempts to interfere in the American presidential election of 2016.

If you're an authoritarian government that thinks that everything is a secret and that you are the only body that is allowed to disseminate information, and that anybody else who puts out information in any other way, with any other angle, with any other information that you don't want out there, is a spy, a traitor, a saboteur, then yes, you could make that argument, but I would really warn against that because you could say that then also about the US.

Is it spying on the US government to keep it accountable and to find malfeasance in the US government? Is it industrial spying, if we're trying to, for example, keep Wall Street accountable, and we reveal some of their malfeasance and malpractice? I think the question there is who your allegiance is to? [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and also who you're being paid by.

Julia Ioffe: Totally.

Brian Lehrer: It's one thing for an actual American spy working for the government's interest, it's another thing for a journalist working for a news organization who is not interested in any government's interest but just interested in getting the truth, sometimes complex truths out.

Julia Ioffe: Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, we just recently had a president in this country who called the news media the enemy of the people, echoes of Putin.

Julia Ioffe: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: I want to get a couple of minutes with you on the leaked intelligence documents. You're also writing about that. I see you have an interview on Puck with Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Mark Warner. Does he have a damage assessment, especially as it relates to the war in Ukraine?

Julia Ioffe: Not when we spoke. We spoke a few hours after he had gotten into his office from the Easter holiday, and it seems that people in Washington are still trying to assess the damage. It's still early days and it's hard to say, but it does seem that a lot was compromised in this leak in terms of sources and methods, which is Washington speak for the ways in which American intelligence agencies gather their information. That allows our adversaries or enemies to shut off those flows of information.

Sometimes that means dispensing with the human actors who provide American spies with information. In some ways, it has compromised individual people. It seems that it is affecting Ukrainian war plans for the spring offensive. We now see that Ukraine is altering its plans for the spring offensive because of what was revealed in the documents. Again, it's still early days, but I think the damage and the impact is going to be massive.

Brian Lehrer: Reporting indicates it leaked out through the social media site Discord, and someone described as a minor British celebrity on Discord who goes by Wow Mao, does this Wow Mao, W-O-W M-A-O, with that name, have a connection to or sympathy for the Chinese Communist Party. Does anybody think?

Julia Ioffe: I have no idea. We don't know. Again, there's still so much we don't know, and it would be hard to-- I think it would be foolish to speculate until we know.

Brian Lehrer: Julia Ioffe, Washington correspondent and founding partner of Puck News. Thank you, Julia. Thank you very much.

Julia Ioffe: Thank you so much, Brian.

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.