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Sloviansk strike and the leaked Pentagon files
Summary
A retrospective on 14 April 2023, when a missile strike killed civilians in Donetsk Oblast while Washington dealt with a leak of classified war documents.
What did the war in Ukraine look like on 14 April 2023? It had two faces: missiles landing on residential areas, and a security breach in Washington that exposed secrets about the conflict.
On that day, a Russian missile strike hit Sloviansk in Donetsk Oblast. It killed at least eight civilians and injured 21 others.
A pattern of strikes on towns
The Sloviansk attack followed others in the preceding days. On 9 April 2023, a Russian missile strike on Zaporizhzhia destroyed a residential building and damaged dozens of other buildings. Two civilians were killed and another was injured. Russian attacks were also reported that day in other settlements, including Orikhiv and Huliaipole.
The leak in Washington
Alongside the fighting, a second story was unfolding. On 8 April 2023, two sets of classified United States documents relating to the war were leaked online. The material also included intelligence that the United States held on other nations, among them North Korea, China, Iran and the United Arab Emirates.
On 10 April 2023, U.S. officials confirmed that top secret government documents on the war had been leaked on social media. They said the documents revealed details of Ukrainian military vulnerabilities. The Pentagon referred the leak to the Department of Justice, which opened a criminal investigation.
By 14 April 2023, then, the picture was of a war fought on two fronts. Civilians in Ukrainian towns were bearing the cost of continued Russian missile strikes. Meanwhile, the confirmed leak and the criminal inquiry kept attention on how sensitive information about the conflict was being protected.
