The person behind a social media account that shares pro-Moscow messages lives in Washington state, the newspaper has revealed
A 37-year-old former US Navy officer is the face of the pro-Russian online collective ‘Donbass Devushka’, the Wall Street Journal has reported. The newspaper confirmed claims about the woman’s identity made by NAFO, a pro-Ukrainian online movement.
Donbass Devushka (“Donbass Girl”) is a group of 15 individuals headed by Sarah Bils, a former US enlisted aviation electronics technician, the newspaper reported on Sunday. The WSJ interviewed her a day earlier at her home in Oak Harbor, Washington state, discussing her activities and the role of the collective in disseminating classified materials leaked from the Pentagon.
Airman First Class Jack Teixeira has been charged with improperly sharing the materials. The Donbass Devushka accounts were apparently among the first to share some of the documents and gain serious traction. Bils said another administrator posted them and that she didn’t break any US laws.
“I obviously know the gravity of top-secret classified materials. We didn’t leak them,” she told the WSJ.
Bils served at the US naval air station on Whidbey Island until last November and was promoted to the E-7 rank in late 2022, the report said. She was discharged with honor and with the lower rank of E-5, though the reason for her demotion was not clear. She claimed in the interview that she left for medical reasons after suffering from PTSD. Her rank gave her access to some classified information.
A local news report from September 2021 mentions a Sarah Bils, 36, being involved in a high-speed collision on Whidbey Island, in which two local residents in another car were injured.
Bils has claimed to have Russian and Jewish heritage and even spoke with a Russian accent in podcasts she hosted. Her identity as “a regular Yankee girl, living in Oak Harbor” was reported in a Twitter thread on Sunday by Pekka Kallioniemi, who is a fellow at the University of Tampere in Finland. He credited NAFO, a pro-Kiev online movement known for the use of Shiba Inu dog images and trolling tactics, for outing her.
Kallioniemi branded Bils a “grifter” and alleged that she was running propaganda for donations. She denied to the WSJ that she had sent money to the Russian military, which would have violated US sanctions. The “small” amount of money she had raised went to funding the collective’s operations and to charities in Serbia, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and the Palestinian territories, she claimed.
