A member of the Ukrainian special forces performs a zeroing of his weapon before a mission, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Bakhmut region, Ukraine, April 6, 2023.
Kai Pfaffenbach | Reuters
The Department of Defense and the Department of Justice are reviewing several documents that were released on several social media sites and appear to detail US and NATO assistance to Ukraine, but may have been altered or used as part of a disinformation campaign.
The documents, posted on sites such as Twitter, are labeled secret and resemble routine updates that the US military’s Joint Staff makes every day but are not distributed publicly. They are dated from February 23 to March 1, and provide what appear to be details on the progress of weapons and equipment going to Ukraine with more precise timelines and amounts than the US usually provides. in public.
These are not war plans and they do not provide details on any planned offensive in Ukraine. And some inaccuracies — including estimates of Russian troop deaths that are significantly lower than numbers publicly stated by US officials — have led some to question the authenticity of the documents.
“It is very important to note that in recent decades, the most successful operations of the Russian special services take place in Photoshop,” Andriy Yusov, a spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence directorate, told Ukrainian TV. “From a preliminary analysis of these materials, we see false, distorted figures on losses on both sides, with part of the information collected from open sources.”
Separately, however, the office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy released a statement on Friday about a meeting he had with his senior military personnel, and noted that “the participants of the meeting focused on measures to prevent leaks of information about the plans of the defense forces of Ukraine.”
If the published documents are to any degree authentic, however, the leak of classified data is troubling and raises questions about what other information about the war in Ukraine — or any coming offensive — is. can be distributed. US officials on Friday provided no clarity on the source of the documents, their authenticity, or who actually first posted them online.
The New York Times was the first to report on the documents. later friday, the Times reported more documents involving Ukraine as well as other sensitive national security topics such as China and the Middle East began to surface on social media.
Sabrina Singh, a Pentagon spokeswoman, would only say that “we are aware of the reports of the social media posts, and the Department is reviewing the matter.”
The Department of Justice released a statement late Friday saying, “We have been in contact with the Department of Defense regarding this matter and have begun an investigation.”
A US official said the documents resembled data produced daily by the Joint Staff, although some figures were incorrect. Even if they are legitimate, the official said, the US believes the documents have little real intelligence value, as most of them are information Russia already knows or can glean from the battlefield. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the intelligence documents.
Charts and graphs depict some of the battlefield status of both sides since a month ago, US military movements in the past 24 hours, personnel numbers and the local outlook on the weather.
But there are mistakes. Under a section titled “Total Assessed Casualties,” one document lists 16,000-17,500 Russian casualties and up to 71,000 Ukrainian casualties. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said publicly in November that Russia had lost “well over” 100,000 soldiers, and Ukraine had lost about that many. And those estimates have continued to climb in recent months, though officials have stopped short of providing more exact numbers.
