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4 Mins Ago

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin testifies before a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on President Biden's proposed budget request for the Department of Defense for fiscal year 2024, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., March 28, 2023.

Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

U.S. officials have identified the person suspected of leaking classified government documents as 21-year-old Jack Teixeira, NBC News reported.

Officials speaking on condition of anonymity said they have been tracking Teixeira, a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, for some time and that an arrest is imminent. The New York Times first identified Teixeira as the suspect on Thursday.

Chelsey Cox

57 Mins Ago

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov delivers a speech during a session of the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, in Moscow, Russia February 15, 2023.

Russian State Duma | Reuters

Russia's Ambassador to the United States called on the State Department to process the visa request of Russian Foreign Minister SergeiLavrov ahead of a meeting at the United Nations in New York.

Lavrov is slated to chair several UN Security Council meetings during the last week of April. Russia currently holds the one-month rotating presidency of the UN Security Council.

Anatoly Antonov said the visa request was submitted to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow at the end of March. "However, not a single entry permission has been granted so far," Antonov said, adding that the embassy canceled a visa appointment on March 31 without providing an explanation.

"We urge Washington to immediately issue visas for our delegation, as well as for our journalists. Failure to do that is a violation of the United States' obligations as the host country of the UN headquarters," he said.

Antonov added that the U.S. must also grant flight permissions for the Russian delegation "without any conditions or restrictions."

Amanda Macias

An Hour Ago

A U.S. Air Force Raptor F22, F16 fighter jets and MIG-29 of the Polish Air Force take part in a NATO Air Force military drill on October 12, 2022 in Lask, Poland.

Anadolu Agency | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

Germany approved Poland's request to transfer five Soviet-designed MiG 29 fighter jets Germany previously owned to Ukraine, the Associated Press reported.

Polish President Andrzej Duda said his country already had provided four MiG-29 jets to Ukraine, with four more in the process of getting handed over and another six being prepared, according to the AP report.

Germany itself has not supplied Ukraine with jets.

Melodie Warner

2 Hours Ago

The European Union will launch an 11th wave of sanctions on Russia and seek to crack down on efforts to evade economic penalties introduced in the wake of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a top EU official told CNBC Thursday.

"Europe has rolled out 10 packages of sanctions. We will have another package," Mairead McGuinness, EU commissioner for financial stability, financial services and capital markets union, told CNBC's Joumanna Bercetche at the International Monetary Fund's spring meeting in Washington, D.C.

EU countrieshave been in talksabout drawing up a fresh round of sanctions against Russia in recent weeks and McGuinness confirmed an 11th package of measures is on its way.

Read the full report here.

Ryan Browne

3 Hours Ago

The Biden administration is looking at expanding how it monitors social media sites and chatrooms after U.S. intelligence agencies failed to spotclassified Pentagon documents circulating online for weeks, according to a senior administration official and a congressional official briefed on the matter.

The possible change in the intelligence-gathering process is just one potential shift as officials scramble to determine not onlyhow the documents leakedbut also how to prevent another damaging incident.

President Joe Biden and other officials were dismayed when they learned the documents had been online for at least a month. Some documents may have appeared as early as January, according to Bellingcat, the open-source investigative group.

Read the full report here.

NBC News

2 Hours Ago

Among the latest revelations from leaked Pentagon documents that have been circulating on social media are details of infighting in the Russian government, the New York Times reported.

NBC has not independently verified the report, and the Times concedes that it has not been able to authenticate the documents in question. NBC's reporting on the previous batch of documents that appeared online suggested that some of them may have been altered.

"The depth of the infighting inside the Russian government appears broader and deeper than previously understood, judging from a newly discovered cache of classified intelligence documents that has been leaked online," the Times wrote.

Natasha Turak

3 Hours Ago

Aerial view of the Pentagon building photographed on Sept. 24, 2017.

Bill Clark | CQ-Roll Call Group | Getty Images

The Department of Defense is moving to further restrict access to sensitive information following a massive intelligence leak that's disclosed classified U.S. government planning and assessments on Ukraine and a number of other countries.

"The Department of Defense say they have taken steps to further restrict access to sensitive information," White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters in response to reporting from the Washington Post that the leaks were disseminated in an online chat platform.

"Look, we are certainly reviewing the national security implications of the disclosure and I can add that to mitigate the impact the release of these documents have on our U.S. national security and also on our allies and partners as well, so this is something we are taking very seriously," she said. "There is an ongoing investigation. DOD has taken steps to restrict access to these documents and definitely don't want don't want to get ahead of what is happening."

Natasha Turak

4 Hours Ago

The source behind the trove of classified documents leaked to social media that have become the biggest U.S. intelligence breach since Edward Snowden worked on a U.S. military base, according to reporting by the Washington Post.

NBC has not independently verified the report, whose main source is a minor who was granted anonymity by the Washington Post. The Post said it also reviewed approximately 300 photos of classified documents, most of which have not been made public.

The minor communicated with the leaker for years on an invite-only group chat on the online gaming platform Discord, whose members, the Post wrote, were "united by their mutual love of guns, military gear and God."

The Post reports that the leaker shared "what appeared to be near-verbatim transcripts of classified intelligence documents that [he] indicated he had brought home from his job on a 'military base'," the location of which he did not disclose.

The White House responded to the reporting, saying the Department of Defense has taken steps to further restrict access to sensitive information and that an investigation is ongoing.

Natasha Turak

5 Hours Ago

Wholesale food market in Moscow.

Picture Alliance | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Russia's headline inflation fell to 3.5% in March, down by 7.5% from the previous year, with the large contrast mainly due to Russia's post invasion inflation spike in March of 2022, Goldman Sachs said.

Last month's figure is below the Russian central bank's long-run target of 4%, but Goldman analysts believe this level is temporary and will rise to approach 7% by the end of 2023.

"Looking forward, we think inflation is near its trough and that it will remain near 4% in Q2-2023. However, we expect base effects to slowly fade going forward ... Adding to this are exchange rate pressures stemming from the weakening of the Ruble since November, which has depreciated more than 10% against the USD and around 12% vis--vis the RMB year-to-date," Goldman wrote in a note Thursday.

"We forecast the weaker Ruble to eventually pass-through consumer prices, specifically the mostly imported non-food goods in Russia. From H2-2023 on, therefore, we forecast inflation to re-rise and stand close to 7% by year-end."

Natasha Turak

6 Hours Ago

Ukrainian state gas company Naftogaz said Russia has been ordered to pay it $5 billion in compensation for illegally seizing its assets in Crimea in 2014. The order came from The Hague's Arbitration Tribunal in the Netherlands.

The ruling is a "key victory on the energy front," Naftogaz CEO Oleksiy Chernyshov said of the news. He added that he expects more wins for Ukraine. Russia illegally annexed Ukraine's Crimean peninsula in 2014.

"Despite Russia's attempts to obstruct justice, the Arbitration Tribunal ordered Russia to compensate Naftogaz for losses of $5 billion," Naftogaz said in a statement. "Russia must now comply with this decision in accordance with its obligations under international law."

It's not clear how Russia's payment will be enforced, and the Russian government did not immediately respond to the ruling. But if Russia refuses to pay, Naftogaz said it could launch a "process of recognition and admission to enforce the award in the territory of those states where assets of the Russian Federation are located."

Natasha Turak

8 Hours Ago

Russia announced that it would cut oil production by 500,000 barrels per day in March after the West slapped price caps on Russian oil and oil products.

Picture Alliance | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

The Group of Seven advanced economies is not expected to update its price cap on Russian oil in the coming weeks amid contrasting views on whether the policy is truly denting the Kremlin's revenues.

The G-7, alongside the European Union and Australia, decided late last year to impose a cap of $60 a barrel on Russian oil in an effort to ratchet up the pressure on Moscow. As part of the agreement, they said they would review this cap in mid-March.

However, despite calls to do so from several countries in Europe, the threshold was not revised last month even as oil prices fell from the levels seen in the two months prior to mid-March. If a revision had taken place, the $60 barrel level would likely have been reduced.

Read the full story here.

Silvia Amaro

8 Hours Ago

The grain harvester collects wheat on the field near the village of Zgurivka in the Kyiv region, while Russia continues the war against Ukraine. August 9, 2022.

Maxym Marusenko | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Ukraine's gross domestic product dropped by nearly a third in 2022, which was dominated by Russia's full-scale invasion that began on Feb. 24 of that year.

The GDP of the war-battered country fell by 29.1%, Ukraine's state statistics service reported, although this was just slightly better than the government's forecast of a 30% drop.

More than 8 million people have fled Ukraine as refugees, amounting to around 20% of the country's population. Russia's war has killed tens of thousands of people, devastated industries and destroyed and damaged vital energy infrastructure around the country.

Russia's naval blockade of Ukraine's Black Sea ports has also throttled the majority of Ukraine's vital grain and produce exports, which comprise a significant portion of the world's supply of soft commodities such as grain, corn, and sunflower seeds. Exports as a whole were down 35% in 2022 from the year before, Ukraine's economy ministry said.

Still, Kyiv says GDP may grow 1% in 2023 due to improvements in the retail, transportation and construction sectors.

Natasha Turak

9 Hours Ago

The European Commissioner for the economy, Paolo Gentiloni, has hailed the EU's swift transition away from its dependency on Russian gas and said next winter will be less challenging.

"We were expecting a terrible winter, a winter of recession and problems with energy supplies, blackouts," he told CNBC's Joumanna Bercetche in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday. "We didn't have recession and we were able to go out from dependency from Russian gas in eight months. I think, amazing results."

Asked whether he believed the energy crisis was over, he said: "I think it will be a challenge also for next winter, maybe a less dramatic challenge than it has been in the past winter, because we should remember we had a more than 40% dependency from Russian fossil fuels, and this is now down around 7%."

He said the EU would be refiling storage from the end of April without Russian gas and said it was important to diversify pipelines, noting increased Chinese demand following its lockdown reopening may bring liquefied gas prices up.

"More optimistically, the big, big challenge was last winter, next winter will also be challenging but we already know we were able to do something amazing," Gentiloni said.

Jenni Reid

10 Hours Ago

Ukraine's Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal attends a news conference, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine March 3, 2023.

Stringer | Reuters

Ukraine secured a $200 million World Bank grant to fund the restoration of its energy sector.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said the funds will go toward rebuilding the power grid and heat supply systems in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Sumy and cities in the Chernihiv region.

Russia has targeted Ukraine's energy infrastructure in waves of air strikes, causing power outages for millions of people.

"Energy infrastructure has suffered $11 billion in damages over the last year and is one of the most critical areas whereUkraine needs urgent support," World Bank Managing Director of Operations Anna Bjerde said in a statement."We are grateful for strong partnership with Ukraine and development partners to support this critical sector and act fast."

Shmyhal previously named energy as one of Ukraine's key sectors for rebuilding the economy.

He added that Ukraine and the World Bank will intensify three projects in energy, transport infrastructure and health care as part of reconstruction.

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Ukraine war live updates: U.S. officials identify leaked documents suspect as 21-year-old Air National Guardsman; Germany approves Polands transfer of...