ahead. i ll speak with the family of paul weiland, another american, the kremlin has locked up on espionage charges and a group of military families gets the tragic news. nine service members killed when two black hawk choppers crashed. cnn has a crew right near that save. plus tension in the house from paper tossing to hallway shouting in your face. debates are getting heated on the hill. welcome to the lead. i m pamela brown in for jake tapper, and we start today with our world lead. top u . s. officials are strongly criticizing russia after an american reporter was detained on charges of spying. evan gersh covic appeared in a moscow court today accused of trying to steal russian state secrets. his employer, the wall street journal, says it quote vehemently denies those claims. but now gorshkov itch faces up to 20 years in prison. and today , lawmakers on capitol hill are accusing russia of using this journalist as leverage, and the white house is dismissing the charges.
world headquarters in new york. a busy hour ahead. right now, president biden is on his way to wisconsin on an unofficial post state of the union tour after his rousing address before the joint session of congress last night. imploring lawmakers to finish the job, the president defended his record and called for more bipartisanship. but did manage to tangle with republicans at times. some republicans want medicare and social security sunset. i m not saying it is a majority. anybody who doubts it, contact my office, i ll give you a copy. i ve give you a copy of the proposal. coming up, we ll talk about how president biden may use those gop outbursts to his advantage. plus, the drama on the floor before the president even walked out. what senator mitt romney is saying about this moment, the moment when he called out george santos to his face on the house floor, with cameras rolling. he shouldn t have been there. he shouldn t be in the look, he s a sick puppy. also t
they re trying to hold every inch of territory in that city. how has that changed the way they re fighting this side? reporter: it s made it on the russian side, dirtier. on the ukrainian, more desperate. the last few days as the offensive gains in intensity, as the conditions on the ground worsen, those images geolocated by cnn that showed the conditions around bakhmut pretty grim with mud, making the roads pretty much impassable. what ukrainian authorities and president sens has said tonight is things are getting more and more challengichallenging. what we re seeing are a series of intense attacks, but it is the battle for the town of bakhmut that gets worse and more intense by the day with ukrainian officials describing it as the epicenter. there have been today hundreds of artillery barrages and rocket strikes by the russians as they try and encircle the town, and specifically the areas of settlements to the west of it. desperate pleas on the part of the ukrainians once
we start with a denial from ukraine of any involvement in september s attacks on the nord stream pipelines, which were built to carry russian natural gas to germany. the denial follows this report from the new york times. it cites us intelligence officials, suggesting a pro ukrainian group was to blame. before we look at those claims, let s get more details about the nord stream pipelines. let s get more details this map shows where they run along the sea bed, from russia, across the baltic, to germany. the damage was discovered near the danish island of bornholm. it s also relatively close to the russian territory of kaliningrad. it was first noticed when huge amounts of gas were spotted bubbling up to the surface. when cameras were sent down, this is what they recorded. several experts said it appeared the pipes had been damaged by an explosion on the outside of the pipe. here s ukrainian defence minister oleksi reznikov on the new allegations. for me, it s a little bit o
off a furious weeklong scramble to find the source of the leak. it also raises questions about who should be able to get access to classified documents. cnn senior national security correspondent alex marquardt joining us now from washington. hi alex. what more are you learning about jack teixeira? good morning, andrea and victor. well airman, first class jack to share as you say, 21 years old. he enlisted in the air national guard back in 2019 surround four years ago, and for the past two years he has held top secret security clearance. now, according to this unsealed affidavit that was unsealed in court yesterday, he has been posting classified information online. since december. at first it was just text that he was posting. but then, a month later in january, he started according to the fbi, posting photographs of these classified documents that we have now seen. so these hundreds of documents have been online for months before they really came to light that was back on a