Canadian teen jailed in Poland as Russia spy may be freed early, court says
A statement by the court did not give details of the possible conditional release.
Europe is in a heightened state of alert over what security agencies across the continent call Russia's "hybrid war" of sabotage and espionage - accusations which the Kremlin has repeatedly denied.
Laken Pavan, who turned 18 a few weeks after his arrest, pleaded guilty to charges of helping Russian intelligence and was sentenced in December 2024. He is due to leave prison in January 2026.
On April 16, 2024 Pavan flew from Vancouver to Moscow via Istanbul and joined a volunteer group in the Russian-occupied eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk, according to Polish court documents seen by Reuters.
The organisation's social media account said it was set up in 2014 to recruit mercenaries to fight for Russia in Donetsk and the neighbouring Ukrainian region of Luhansk and to organise humanitarian projects for civilians.
Pavan told Polish investigators that in late April 2024 he was arrested in Donetsk and questioned by men who said they were from Russia's Federal Security Service, according to the court documents.
After several days of detention, Pavan said, he was instructed to return to Europe, lose his passport to conceal his trip to Russia and begin working for the FSB, the documents showed.
He told Polish prosecutors he flew to Copenhagen, but later decided to move to Warsaw as life in Denmark was too expensive.
A couple of days after checking into a Warsaw budget hotel, Pavan said, he asked a receptionist to call police. When they arrived, he confessed to working with the FSB and planning to pass information about Poland's military to his Russian handler, the court documents showed.
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New York Times
an hour ago
- New York Times
New Reports on Russian Interference Don't Show What Trump Says They Do
The Trump administration in recent weeks has released a series of reports intended to undermine the conclusion reached by intelligence agencies before President Trump's first term that Russia had favored his candidacy in 2016 and sought to improve his chances of winning. That assessment, an unclassified version of which was made public in January 2017, has long infuriated Mr. Trump. In disclosing the reports, he and his team are proclaiming that President Barack Obama and his team torqued the intelligence analysis process to deliberately discredit Mr. Trump's election. The administration has coupled that case with overheated and attention-grabbing claims. Mr. Trump has accused Mr. Obama of treason, and his top officials have made criminal referrals about national security officials under Mr. Obama — all as the administration is trying to distract supporters who are angry about its broken promise to release the Jeffrey Epstein files. Still, even if the administration's use of the reports is wildly overstated, some of the information has not been made public before. It provides some messy details about how the intelligence community assessment was hurriedly produced during Mr. Obama's final months in office. The assessment said that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had ordered a multifaceted information operation targeting the U.S. presidential election, including by hacking and releasing Democratic emails and by seeding social media with messages promoting Mr. Trump and denigrating his rival, Hillary Clinton. The assessment also attributed three motivations to Mr. Putin. Two have not been seriously challenged: He wanted to undermine public faith in democracy and to damage Mrs. Clinton, who until election night was widely seen as the next U.S. president. But Mr. Trump and his allies have long chafed at the third asserted goal — that Russia also hoped to help him win. Their case seeking to undermine the assessment has focused on the unusually rushed and tightly controlled process to complete the document, in which senior leaders like John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, and James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, played a more direct role than would is typical. And their criticism has focused on two main elements. One is the role played by the so-called Steele dossier. The dossier, a compendium of later-discredited claims about Trump-Russia ties compiled by a former British spy, was part of a Democratic-funded political opposition research effort. The other is how the intelligence agencies used information from a well-placed U.S. mole in the Kremlin, whom the C.I.A. later spirited out of Russia. The Dossier The government had already warned the public before the 2016 election that Russia was behind the hacking and dumping of Democratic emails. In early December 2016, after Mr. Trump's surprise victory, Mr. Obama directed the intelligence community to produce a comprehensive analysis of Russia's election meddling, drawing on all available sources of information. The terms of that mandate appear to have led the top officials overseeing the process to include material that might otherwise have been excluded. The Steele dossier is an example. It had been known that the F.B.I. thought the dossier should be used because the standard was to draw on all available sources, while C.I.A. analysts objected because the sourcing for the claims was then unknown. Ultimately, agency leaders negotiated a compromise and put a summary of it in an annex appended to the assessment. Mr. Brennan has publicly said the Steele dossier material was not incorporated or used in the assessment itself because of the C.I.A.'s concerns. In 2017, he told Congress that the dossier 'was not in any way used as a basis for the intelligence community assessment that was done.' The newly disclosed material complicates that narrative. For one, it showed that Mr. Brennan internally defended appending a summary of the dossier to the assessment after C.I.A. analysts resisted the compromise, too. For another, the material has revealed that the classified version of the assessment alerted readers to the existence of the annex. It did so in a fourth bullet point under the judgment that Mr. Putin aspired to help Mr. Trump's chances of winning. 'For additional reporting on Russian plans and intentions, please see Annex A: Additional Reporting from an F.B.I. Source on Russian Influence Efforts,' the bullet point said. Mr. Trump's allies have argued that this sentence means the information from the Steele dossier was incorporated into the assessment itself. 'Counting On' Mr. Obama's mandate to take account of all available information also led the C.I.A. to draw upon some raw intelligence that it might otherwise not have seen fit to publish, or disseminate for analysts to use. The newly disclosed material shows that after Mr. Obama's direction, Mr. Brennan ordered a 'full review,' including the publication of any relevant intelligence that had been collected before the election but not disseminated. The C.I.A. then published 15 additional reports containing raw intelligence it had previously gathered. Three became support for the assessment's judgment that Mr. Putin's motives included wanting to bolster Mr. Trump's chances of winning the election. C.I.A. officials had previously held back each of those three, according to a newly declassified 2020 report by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, because of tradecraft concerns about the information within them. It said the assessment did not flag those worries. The most important of them was something the U.S. mole in the Kremlin had said: that Mr. Putin made public the hacked Democratic emails after deciding that Mr. Trump, 'whose victory Putin was counting on, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory.' The 2020 House committee report said the statement had originally not been disseminated because analysts were not sure what the mole had meant or who specifically the mole had heard that from. The report criticized the assessment for interpreting that phrase to mean Mr. Putin hoped Mr. Trump would win, without flagging that its reading was disputed. Separately, a review of the procedures and analytic tradecraft that went into the assessment, commissioned by John Ratcliffe, Mr. Trump's current C.I.A. director, argued that the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. should not have put the judgment that Mr. Putin was trying to help Mr. Trump at 'high confidence' when only one source explicitly and directly backed that finding. But the review did not challenge the judgment itself as the best reading of the available evidence, instead praising the National Security Agency's view that it merited 'moderate confidence.' And the review acknowledged that analysts might infer support for the judgment from other evidence, including the public behavior of senior Russian officials and state-controlled media — and logic. 'Most analysts judged that denigrating Clinton equaled supporting Trump; they reasoned that in a two-person race the trade-off was zero-sum,' it said. 'This logic train was plausible and sensible, but was an inference rather than fact sourced to multiple reporting streams.' Contrary Findings The reports released by the Trump team are limited to evaluating the use of intelligence that was available in December 2016, and do not address subsequent developments. That includes Mr. Putin's statement at a news conference with Mr. Trump in Helsinki, Finland, in 2018, in which he said through a translator that he had indeed wanted Mr. Trump to win the election 'because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal.' Others who have had access to the previously classified information and files from that period have reached different conclusions. John Durham, a special counsel appointed in Mr. Trump's first term who hunted for a basis to fault the actions of law enforcement and intelligence officials early in that investigation, already scrutinized the drafting of the 2017 intelligence assessment and did not criticize anything about it in his final report. And in a five-volume 2020 report, the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee — led by then-Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican who is now Mr. Trump's secretary of state and national security adviser — reached its own conclusion that Russia's motivations had included aspiring to improve Mr. Trump's chances of winning. Indeed, citing one aspect of the interference — the social media operation by a Russian entity known as the IRA — the Senate report suggested that the 2017 intelligence assessment's judgment was, if anything, understated. 'However, where the intelligence community assessed that the Russian government 'aspired to help President-elect Trump's election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him,' the committee found that IRA social media activity was overtly and almost invariably supportive of then-candidate Trump, and to the detriment of Secretary Clinton's campaign,' the Senate report said. Overstated Claims The finely tuned distinctions and marginal questions raised by the newly available information in the documents sharply contrasts with the overstated and sometimes sensationalized claims Trump administration officials keep making about them. This month, when Mr. Ratcliffe rolled out his review, he also blamed the assessment for establishing a narrative that the Trump campaign may have colluded with Russia, leading to the inquiry led by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel. 'They stamped it as Russian collusion and then classified it so nobody could see it,' Mr. Ratcliffe told The New York Post. 'This led to Mueller. It put the seal of approval of the intelligence community that Russia was helping Trump and that the Steele dossier was the scandal of our lifetime.' In reality, the Mueller investigation grew out of an F.B.I. investigation that began in July 2016, five months before the assessment, and its basis was a lead from the Australian government, not the Steele dossier. Mr. Ratcliffe also made a criminal referral of Mr. Brennan that accuses him of lying to Congress, leading the Justice Department to open an investigation. Last week, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, released an 11-page timeline and some underlying documents that misleadingly conflated different types of hacking. In a Fox News appearance, she cited the newly declassified existence of 2016 intelligence reports assessing that Moscow was not trying to hack into vote-tallying machines as somehow undermining the fact that Russia hacked and released Democratic emails to affect the election. Ms. Gabbard also said that the materials used for her timeline were proof of a 'treasonous conspiracy' by Mr. Obama and his national security team, and that she, too, was making a criminal referral. Mr. Trump reacted gleefully, reposting materials on social media based on her timeline and remarks, including a fake video of Mr. Obama being led off to prison. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump said, 'Whether it's right or wrong, it's time to go after people. Obama's been caught directly.' The next day, it came to light that Attorney General Pam Bondi had told Mr. Trump in May that his own name appeared in the Epstein files. Hours later, Ms. Bondi announced the creation of a 'strike force' to assess the information provided by Ms. Gabbard.
Wall Street Journal
2 hours ago
- Wall Street Journal
Russiagate and the World's Growing Information Chaos
It isn't the only lesson of the declassified secrets pouring out from the intelligence wars of Democrats vs. Donald Trump in his first term. But it's a lesson worth understanding. It concerns the proliferation of the world's recording media, from servers and hard drives to thumb drives and flash drives, on which data—mostly flotsam—accumulate at an ever-growing rate, currently generating in a day what it took four months to generate in 2015.
Politico
3 hours ago
- Politico
Moderate Dems get tougher on Netanyahu
With help from Joe Gould, Phelim Kine and Daniel Lippman Subscribe here | Email Eric The rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip is causing even some of Israel's staunchest defenders in the Democratic party to pile some harsh criticism on the U.S. ally. The top Democrats on the Senate Armed Services, Intelligence, Foreign Relations and Judiciary Committees and relevant foreign policy and defense Appropriations subcommittees issued a joint statement today calling on President DONALD TRUMP to apply more pressure on Israeli Prime Minister BENJAMIN NETANYAHU to end the war in the Gaza Strip and restore the distribution of food and other humanitarian aid into the territory. None of these Democrats — Sens. JEANNE SHAHEEN of New Hampshire, JACK REED of Rhode Island, MARK WARNER of Virginia, DICK DURBIN of Illinois, CHRIS COONS of Delaware and BRIAN SCHATZ of Hawaii — are avowed critics of Israel. Most have only rebuked Israel periodically since the Gaza war broke out and have supported aid to Israel throughout their careers. And they join a whole host of pro-Israel Democrats who have voiced their discomfort with Israel's actions over the course of this week. That includes Sen. MARK KELLY (D-Ariz.), who on Tuesday became one of the first prominent Democratic moderates to do so, and Sen. AMY KLOBUCHAR (D-Minn.), the third-highest ranking Democratic leader in the Senate. Klobuchar issued a sharp rebuke to Israel in a floor speech Thursday. On the House side, Rep. RITCHIE TORRES (D-N.Y.) got into a spat Thursday on X with Rep. RANDY FINE (R-Fla.) after Fine said that Palestinians should 'starve away' in the Gaza Strip until Hamas released the remaining Israeli hostages in its captivity. Torres has previously come under fire from critics of Israel for at times being too dismissive about the plight of Palestinians in the enclave. The moderates are sounding more and more like progressives, who have been lashing out at Israel for its approach to the Gaza war and calling on the White House across two administrations to use every tool possible to push Netanyahu to alleviate human suffering in the enclave. It's a critical moment in the conflict. The Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has struggled to distribute aid to Palestinians in the enclave, exacerbating widespread starvation in the territory. Israeli troops are accused of firing on Palestinians seeking aid, killing hundreds of Palestinian civilians in recent weeks. Israel has downplayed concerns about the inadequacy of humanitarian aid, blaming Hamas for the violence associated with aid not getting to people and arguing it's a question of inadequate distribution, not volume, of aid entering the territory. The Trump administration has repeatedly pointed the finger at Hamas for the plight of Palestinians in the enclave. 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WORSENING FIREFIGHT IN ASIA: Fighting between Thailand and Cambodia along their border continued into today, forcing thousands of civilians on both sides to flee the area. The two countries have been in talks for a ceasefire. But with them trading fire from powerful rocket launchers and artillery, that's looking increasingly unlikely. Acting Thai Prime Minister PHUMTHAM WECHAYACHAI said the conflict could become a war, threatening yet greater violence between the two historic adversaries. Thailand has accused Cambodia of intentionally targeting civilians. The brewing conflict could complicate efforts for the U.S. to counter China in the Indo-Pacific. Thailand, the militarily more powerful nation, is a close U.S. ally. Cambodia is more aligned with China, Vietnam and Russia, from whom it has received military supplies. NUDGING A NUKE DEAL: With the New START Treaty set to expire in 195 days, arms control advocates are urging Trump and Russian President VLADIMIR PUTIN to strike an interim deal to avoid a surge in nuclear weapons. 'Unless Trump and Putin reach an interim deal to maintain existing limits, we could soon see each side increasing the size of their deployed nuclear arsenals for the first time in more than 35 years by uploading warheads on existing missiles, which is no one's interests,' DARYL KIMBALL, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said in a statement. The comments came after Trump signaled support for renewed talks, telling Russia's TASS, 'We are starting to work on that. That is a big problem for the world, when you take off nuclear restrictions, that's a big problem.' SOME NEWS ON THE HOME FRONT: Are you a NatSec Daily reader who also cares deeply about the economic changes the Trump administration is ushering in? We have good news for you. POLITICO's flagship financial newsletter has a new Friday edition built for the economic era we're living in: one shaped by political volatility, disruption and a wave of policy decisions with sector-wide consequences. Each week, Morning Money: Capital Risk brings sharp reporting and analysis on how political risk is moving markets and how investors are to know how health care regulation, tariffs or court rulings could ripple through the economy? Start here. The first issue dropped today. Read it here. IT'S FRIDAY! WELCOME TO THE WEEKEND: Thanks for tuning in to NatSec Daily! This space is reserved for the top U.S. and foreign officials, the lawmakers, the lobbyists, the experts and the people like you who care about how the natsec sausage gets made. Aim your tips and comments at ebazail@ and follow Eric on X @ebazaileimil. While you're at it, follow the rest of POLITICO's global security team on social media: @dave_brown24, @HeidiVogt, @jessicameyers, @RosiePerper, @ @PhelimKine, @felschwartz, @connorobrienNH, @paulmcleary, @reporterjoe, @JackDetsch, @samuelskove, @magmill95, @johnnysaks130 and @delizanickel Keystrokes LIE TO ME: The five leading Chinese artificial intelligence chatbots provided false or unhelpful information more than half the time in a test run by analytics company NewsGuard, the company said today. In the test, the company presented chatbots with 10 false narratives spread by Chinese official media and pro-Chinese media. The narratives included that the U.S. had severed relations with China and that Taiwan was calling up draftees in preparation for war with China. In 40 percent of cases, the chatbots — Ernie, DeepSeek, MiniMax, Qwen and Yuanbao — presented false information. In 20 percent of cases, the chatbots did not debunk the false narratives. In one case, a chatbot presented Chinese government policy on Taiwan without being explicitly asked to do so. The failure rates were similar in Mandarin and English. It's a troubling finding for users in China, but also elsewhere as Chinese chatbots are increasingly popular across the world. The Complex NASA EXODUS: NASA will lose 20 percent or more of its staff, including thousands of senior personnel, under a Trump administration push to slim the federal government, Sam reports in POLITICO's Space newsletter. The voluntary departures include 2,892 civil servants in the agency's GS-13 through GS-15 pay levels — senior positions reserved for those with significant technical or managerial responsibilities, like planning Mars missions or leading work on space telescopes. The losses could affect U.S. plans to land astronauts on the moon by 2027, a key goal as the U.S. races to beat China back to the lunar surface. In an open letter to interim NASA Administrator Sean Duffy, a group of current and former NASA employees protested this week that the departures would eliminate 'highly specialized, irreplaceable knowledge crucial to carrying out NASA's mission.' Still, the departures, which the administration has incentivized through a range of offerings to employees, may not be enough for the Trump administration. The White House wants to cut over 5,000 staff from NASA from its 2024 staffing level, meaning that NASA may have to fire more than 1,000 additional staff. POLISH ARMS: The United States on Friday announced a $4 billion loan guarantee to Poland under the Foreign Military Financing program, a big boon for one of the NATO allies most in the Trump administration's good graces. The announcement did not name any specific acquisition programs that the loan guarantee might support. Poland has gone on a buying spree of U.S. arms in recent years, a binge that has included 96 Apache helicopters and over 400 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems. 'Poland remains one of America's strongest and most dependable allies in Europe,' State Department spokesperson TAMMY BRUCE said in a statement. Poland's spending of more than 4 percent of its gross domestic product on its military places it favorably among European nations for the Trump administration, which has pressed for NATO members to spend five percent of GDP on defense. NATO members agreed to hit this goal by 2035 at the most recent summit. Poland aims to hit that number by 2026, officials have previously said. Broadsides CHINA CRIES COLONIALISM: The Chinese government's hands-off approach to the worsening cross-border military skirmishes between U.S. treaty ally Thailand and China-aligned Cambodia isn't curbing Beijing from blaming Western countries for the dispute. 'The root cause of this issue stems from the legacy of Western colonialism from years past, and now requires a calm and prudent approach to resolution,' Chinese Foreign Minister WANG YI told ASEAN Secretary-General KAO KIM HOURN in Beijing today, per a Chinese Foreign Ministry statement. Wang made clear Beijing is leaving it to ASEAN — of which Cambodia and Thailand are both members — to undertake 'mediation efforts' between Bangkok and Phnom Penh to end the fighting. As in Ukraine, the conflict provides Beijing a real-time opportunity to observe and analyze military tactics and the relative performance of U.S. and Chinese-supplied weaponry. Transitions — DILLON McGREGOR is now acting assistant secretary for legislative affairs at the Department of Homeland Security. He most recently was a senior adviser at DHS. — BRIAN SATTLER is now strategic planner for the senior adviser to the secretary for the Coast Guard. He most recently was director for maritime and industrial capacity at the National Security Council. — PALOMA CHACON has been promoted to press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security. — RAVI SINGH has been promoted to be senior vice president and CFO of the Export-Import Bank of the United States. — JOEL VALDEZ is now acting deputy press secretary for the Pentagon. He most recently was communications director and senior adviser for Rep. LAUREN BOEBERT (R-Colo.) and has previously worked for MATT GAETZ. What to Read — Glenn Gerstell, The New York Times: Remember the TikTok Ban? Does Anyone? — Marton Dunai, The Financial Times: Could Hungary's faltering economy topple Orbán? — Katharine Houreld, The Washington Post: As Kenya's protests intensified, two friends bled on opposite sides Monday Today — Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 11 a.m.: Violence in Suwayda: No 'Plan B' for Syria? — Hudson Institute, 4:30 p.m.: What Taiwan Can Learn from Ukraine's Battlefield Experience. Thanks to our editors, Heidi Vogt and Emily Lussier, who provide us with false or unhelpful information more than half the time.
