It’s a trooper hunt in the US after the new leak of top secret documents that ended up on social media, a sensational flaw – despite suspicions of Russian manipulation – that caught the White House by surprise and put intelligence on alert for fear of burning itself. Sources and sparking diplomatic implications. Dozens of classified documents have been released on Twitter, Telegram, Discord and other social networks in recent days, and new documents are still emerging.
The US Department of Justice has opened an investigation to try to determine the source of the leaked document. According to preliminary findings, these leaks concern not only reports and documents related to the conflict in Ukraine, But also very accurate analyzes of US allies. The Pentagon also said on Friday that it was investigating the matter.
The existence of the documents was first reported from The New York Times After a number of Russian Telegram channels shared Five video files related to the invasion of Ukraine on the 5th of April. According to the investigation platform BellingcatAnd These documents appear to be dated early March, around the time they were first posted online on Discordwhich is a popular messaging platform among gamers.
Ukrainian officials have questioned the authenticity of the documents, with Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to the Ukrainian president, saying on Telegram that Russia was behind the alleged leak. But US security officials quoted them The New York Times They seem to indicate their authenticity. Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the newspaper CNN The documents show the extent of US and NATO involvement in Ukraine.
always the second BellingcatNo documents were scanned, but they were photographed. In the released photos, wrinkles can be seen on documents containing objects. This seems to indicate that at least some of the documents were photographed in the same location. The content of the joint documents varies, including maps of hotspots in Ukraine such as Bakhmut and Kharkiv, an almanac of Western munitions deliveries to Ukraine, as well as maps and catalogs of Ukrainian air defense assets, including an almanac of munitions expenditures. The photos also included a March 2 “CIA Operations Center Intelligence Update” marked “Top Secret,” although much of the information in these documents had previously been made public through media reports.
Given that these are (as in the Cold War era) images of printed maps and presentation slides, and that confidential documents can only be printed on authorized systems, there is likely some documentary record of who dealt with them.
The second “leak” involves more than 100 documents that appeared on 4chan, an anonymous messaging platform, and then on other social networks including Twitter.sourced from different agencies, although all Pentagon employees have collected it: from the State Department to the National Security Agency, from the CIA to the Geospatial Intelligence Agency that analyzes satellite imagery.
On April 5, the documents began circulating through pro-Russian Telegram channels, with Bellingcat finding the first copy on the “Donbass Devushka” Telegram channel. Just two hours ago, a 4chan user posted the first of eight messages in a politically incorrect wall thread (/pol/), three of which attached images of seemingly similar documents. There is one image shared between the Telegram posts and 4chan: A map showing a variety of statistics, including the cumulative number of KIA soldiers (killing in action) on the Russian and Ukrainian sides during the war. However, the numbers differ, with the first source (4chan) showing more Russian losses than Ukrainian losses, and the second source (Donbass Devushka) the opposite. A closer look at the second photo, with the Ukrainian KIA’s much higher numbers, posted to Telegram, shows the crude photo manipulation. Also, the spacing between some numbers and letters is too large to match the font. streetSo it appears that the Donbass Devushka Telegram account, or a previous source posted by this account, altered the original image to make the Ukrainian losses look bigger..
From the second line of leaks it becomes clear that the documents, in some cases so secret that they cannot be shared even with the closest allies, concern not only plans for Ukraine. But also other sensitive files at the center of US security: China, the Indo-Pacific region, the Middle East (especially Israel and Mossad leaders) and terrorism. And if, on the one hand, they confirm the powerful American penetration of Russian military and security systems, on the other hand, he writes The New York Times – Revealing that US intelligence is spying on its allies: for example Ukrainian political and military leaders (a reflection of Washington’s difficulty in obtaining a clear view of Ukrainian combat strategies, according to the newspaper) and Seoul, the latter regarding its decisions on lethal weapons. Kyiv aid.
As for the documents on Kiev, according to a national security official who contacted him The New York TimesAnd It is possible that the Ukrainians did not release the documents because they do not have access to the exact floors that are sealed by the offices of Pentagon employees. A hypothesis that would be supported by the fact that the second leak also includes other non-Ukrainian files. A senior US intelligence official described the leak as a “Five Eyes nightmare,” as the intelligence-sharing alliance between the US, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada is called. One New York Times analyst warned that this is just “the tip of the iceberg”. For Mick Mulroy, a former senior Pentagon official, “it appears to be a deliberate leak by someone wishing to undermine the efforts of Ukraine, the United States and NATO.”
Moscow and Kiev accuse each other of disinformation: for pro-war Russian bloggers it’s the hand of the West 007, and for Ukraine it’s an attempt by the Kremlin to undermine the enemy’s impending counterattack. But Volodymyr Zelensky is not downplaying the new threat and when he called the military leaders on Friday, he discussed not only next steps but also “new measures to prevent information leakage about the plans of Ukrainian forces”.
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