Julian Assange

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/07/15/ecuador-concluded-that-assange-has-ties-to-russian-intelligence/

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/15/politics/assange-embassy-exclusive-documents/index.html

https://twitter.com/DarthPutinKGB/status/1606230451772739585

"In Russia, there are many vibrant publications, online blogs, and Kremlin critics such as [Alexey] Navalny are part of that spectrum. There are also newspapers like "Novaya Gazeta", in which different parts of society in Moscow are permitted to critique each other and it is tolerated, generally, because it isn't a big TV channel that might have a mass popular effect, its audience is educated people in Moscow. So my interpretation is that in Russia there are competitors to WikiLeaks, and no WikiLeaks staff speak Russian, so for a strong culture which has its own language, you have to be seen as a local player. WikiLeaks is a predominantly English-speaking organisation with a website predominantly in English. We have published more than 800,000 documents about or referencing Russia and president Putin, so we do have quite a bit of coverage, but the majority of our publications come from Western sources, though not always. For example, we have published more than 2 million documents from Syria, including Bashar al-Assad personally. Sometimes we make a publication about a country and they will see WikiLeaks as a player within that country, like with Timor East and Kenya. The real determinant is how distant that culture is from English. Chinese culture is quite far away".

https://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2016/12/23/news/assange_wikileaks-154754000/

• https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/19/trump-russia-fake-news-libertarians-autocrats-democracy