Live wires How important are Russia's intercepted military talks?

An extraordinary leak of an online call involving Germany's air force chief and three subordinates emerged last Friday, in which they discussed whether it might be possible to persuade a reluctant chancellor Olaf Scholz to approve giving the long-range Taurus missile to Ukraine, and whether the munition could blow up the strategic Kerch Bridge that connects Russia to occupied Crimea.

- Dan Sabbagh

How did the leak get into the public domain? 

The 38-minute recording was gleefully released on social media by Kremlin propagandist Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of TV network RT. A day later she offered to help Scholz get to the bottom of the leak, after he announced an inquiry to find out how a recording of the top-secret conversation, accepted by Berlin to be genuine, had entered the public domain.

The overt nature of the leak represents a departure from Moscow's previous information operations, where hacked information has passed through non-Russian intermediaries such as WikiLeaks or is dumped online. Significantly, it comes at a time of growing focus on Scholz's continuing refusal to give Taurus to Ukraine, a missile with an operational range of around 480km compared with Kyiv's most effective long range missile, the FrancoBritish Scalp/Storm Shadow, with a range of half that.