Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Photography by Mikhail Svetlov / Getty Images
The city of Blagoveshchensk sits in the far east of Russia, some 3,500 miles from Moscow and further still from Kyiv. Across a river, the Chinese city of Heihe sprawls to the south, joined by the first Sino-Russian road bridge; beside the bridge, there’s little about the city to make the news.
But the public affairs of the city are now laid bare for anyone willing to look in the form of 150GB of emails from the Blagoveshchensk City Administration published online by the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets — just one of many data sets leaked to the organization since the invasion of Ukraine began.
As the war in Ukraine approaches the 60-day mark, leaks from the country have been coming at an unprecedented rate. On April…
