The Wall Street Journal correspondent is not a spy. He is a journalist, and should be released immediately from his Russian jail

Evan Gershkovich , a Wall Street Journal reporter, has spent nearly a year in a Moscow prison, awaiting trial for a crime he did not commit. Mr Gershkovich was arrested last March in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg and jailed on espionage charges. He is not a spy. He is a journalist, and should be released immediately. Hostage diplomacy lies behind his incarceration. As the US ambassador to Russia, Lynne Tracy , said, Mr Gershkovich’s case “is not about evidence, due process, or rule of law. It is about using American citizens as pawns to achieve political ends”.

Vladimir Putin indicated in February that a prisoner exchange could lead to the release of Mr Gershkovich. There have been high-profile prisoner swaps in the past. In December 2022, Moscow traded a US basketball star convicted of a drugs offence in Russia for a Russian arms trafficker. But a journalist’s detention to secure the release of a Russian hitman would underscore Russia’s retreat into a Soviet past. In 1986 an American journalist, Nicholas Daniloff , was arrested and charged with espionage. He was let go after two weeks when the US released a Soviet diplomat accused of spying. Mr Gershkovich has been inside for nearly 12 months.

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State investigations say they have received numerous reports as officials repeat claims that Ukraine and west involved in assault

The final death toll from the Moscow concert hall terrorist attack could be much higher than the 140 confirmed dead, with Russian state investigations saying they have received 143 reports about people who had gone missing .

The investigative committee said in a statement that 84 bodies had so far been identified.

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For Sana Shahmuradova Tanska, art-making became a compulsive way to process the anxiety of living in a war zone

To look at Sana Shahmuradova Tanska’s paintings is to sense that something is awry, without quite knowing why. A series of canvases hanging in Artspace in Woolloomooloo as part of the Biennale of Sydney depicts strange, fantastical scenes that walk a line between Dionysian and dystopic: naked female figures in molten, fiery landscapes; mussels with moony faces swimming next to protean, fish-like forms; anthropomorphic suns weeping over rural landscapes.

Most of the paintings were created in the artist’s studio in Kyiv, Ukraine – some before Russia’s “full invasion” of the country on 24 February 2022, and others immediately after. “That’s just how I keep track of time,” she says. “It’s like this line before and after.”

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Head of Ukrainian air force says they were able to shoot down 10 out of 13 drones launched overnight by Moscow’s forces

The Crocus City Hall attackers attempted to flee to Belarus, according to Alexander Lukashenko .

The Belarus president’s comments, reported by Belarus news agency Belta, undermine Moscow’s narrative that Ukraine was involved in the attack and the terrorists tried to flee there.

Ukraine’s navy claims it has sunk or disabled a third of all Russian warships in the Black Sea in just over two years of war. Dmytro Pletenchuk from the navy said the latest strike on Saturday night hit the Russian amphibious landing ship Kostiantyn Olshansky , which was resting in dock in Sevastopol in Russia-occupied Crimea. The ship was Ukrainian before being captured by Russia in 2014.

Pletenchuk previously announced that two other landing ships of the same type, Azov and Yamal, also were damaged in Saturday’s strike along with the Ivan Khurs intelligence ship. He said the weekend attack, using Ukraine-built Neptune missiles, also hit Sevastopol port facilities and an oil depot . “Our ultimate goal is complete absence of military ships of the so-called Russian Federation in the Azov and Black Sea regions,” Pletenchuk said.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy , has replaced the secretary of Ukraine’s national security council, Oleksiy Danilov, with Oleksandr Lytvynenko, 51, head of the foreign intelligence service . Danilov had been secretary of the council since October 2019. Zelenskiy said Danilov was being transferred to new duties, with details to be made public later. “The strengthening of Ukraine and the renewal of our state system in all sectors will continue.”

Ukraine has staged further air attacks on Belgorod, just over the border inside Russia . The regional governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, reported damage on the ground and claimed air defence engaged 18 incoming targets.

Nato is considering shooting down Russian missiles that stray too close to its borders, Poland’s deputy foreign minister, Andrzej Szejna , has told Polish media outlet RMF24 . “[Russia] knew that if the missile moved further into Poland, it would be shot down. There would be a counterattack.” Poland’s armed forces said Russia violated Poland’s airspace on Sunday morning with a cruise missile launched at targets in western Ukraine.

And away from the war there was some good news for Ukraine on the football pitch with their team qualifying for Euro 2024 following a 2-1 defeat of Iceland at a match played at Poland’s Wroclaw stadium on Tuesday night. As Jonathan Liew writes in our match report, for the thousands of Ukrainian fans who witnessed them qualifying for their first major tournament since the start of the conflict:

In times like these even to shout the name of Ukraine is to partake in a kind of resistance.

You can read his full report here .

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Poland warns Russian missiles coming too close may be shot down; how Ukraine has ramped up making its own weapons. What we know on day 763

• See all our Russia-Ukraine war coverage

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A new worm that spreads via USB sticks is infecting computers in Ukraine and beyond.

The group­—known by many names, including Gamaredon, Primitive Bear, ACTINIUM, Armageddon, and Shuckworm—has been active since at least 2014 and has been attributed to Russia’s Federal Security Service by the Security Service of Ukraine. Most Kremlin-backed groups take pains to fly under the radar; Gamaredon doesn’t care to. Its espionage-motivated campaigns targeting large numbers of Ukrainian organizations are easy to detect and tie back to the Russian government. The campaigns typically revolve around malware that aims to obtain as much information from targets as possible.

One of those tools is a computer worm designed to spread from computer to computer through USB drives. Tracked by researchers from Check Point Research as LitterDrifter, the malware is written in the Visual Basic Scripting language. LitterDrifter serves two purposes: to promiscuously spread from USB drive to USB drive and to permanently infect the devices that connect to such drives with malware that permanently communicates with Gamaredon-operated command-and-control servers.

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Reuters is reporting that the FBI “had identified and disabled malware wielded by Russia’s FSB security service against an undisclosed number of American computers, a move they hoped would deal a death blow to one of Russia’s leading cyber spying programs.”

The headline says that the FBI “sabotaged” the malware, which seems to be wrong.

Presumably we will learn more soon.

Another nation-state malware , Russian in origin:

In the early stages of the war in Ukraine in 2022, PIPEDREAM, a known malware was quietly on the brink of wiping out a handful of critical U.S. electric and liquid natural gas sites. PIPEDREAM is an attack toolkit with unmatched and unprecedented capabilities developed for use against industrial control systems (ICSs).

The malware was built to manipulate the network communication protocols used by programmable logic controllers (PLCs) leveraged by two critical producers of PLCs for ICSs within the critical infrastructure sector, Schneider Electric and OMRON.

CISA advisory . Wired article .