"Rossiyskaya Gazeta" published an article under the heading "Mash: Hackers hacked into the archive of the head of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine with data on the missing military." It says:
“More than 35,000 Ukrainian soldiers are listed as missing. This is reported by the Mash Telegram channel with reference to the documents of the Armed Forces of Ukraine published by hackers from the Anarchist Kombatant group .
It is reported that hackers managed to break into the official archive of the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Lieutenant General Sergei Shaptal. Among the documents is the report of the personnel center of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
According to documents, 35,382 Ukrainian soldiers are considered missing.
“These are military personnel whose bodies were left on the battlefield – they were not taken home and were not buried. And their families will not receive compensation, ”says the Mash material.
In addition, a list of missing persons has been published.
Most of the missing served in the Ground Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine – their personal data occupy 667 sheets. The share of the military from the territorial defense accounted for 546 pages. The rest were in the air assault troops (398), special operations forces (316) and the Navy (242).
The same is reported by Vesti, Arguments and Facts, Regnum and others.
The document published by the Mash Telegram channel looks like this:
The lists of missing persons are not available.
The Insider asked retired SBU Major General Viktor Yagun to comment on the document. In his opinion, the document is a crudely made forgery.
First of all, documents with the heading “tsіlkom taєmno” (“top secret”) are printed on special forms, all of their sheets are numbered. They are processed only on computers that are not connected to networks, are never distributed on electronic media, and cannot be signed with an electronic digital signature. In principle, hackers cannot gain access to such a document, because its electronic copies do not exist.
There should be an outgoing number in the upper left part of the document; on what Mash posted, it's not there. There is also no handwritten signature of the head of the Personnel Center.
The authors of the document, according to General Yagun, have no idea about the command structure of the Ukrainian army. The Ministry of Defense is a civilian governing body, while the General Staff and the Personnel Center are part of a completely different, military structure. The letter from the head of the Personnel Center to the chief of the General Staff on the letterhead of the Ministry of Defense is sheer absurdity, approximately as if internal correspondence in the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs was conducted on letterheads of the Russian Guard.
In response to a request from The Insider to comment on the publication of Mash , the Center for Counteracting Disinformation of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine noted another sign incriminating a fake. As has happened more than once with manufacturers of such products, the text was translated into Ukrainian, but the details were forgotten: in the indication of the date, instead of the Ukrainian preposition “vid”, there is the Russian “from”.
In addition, the Center for Counteracting Disinformation indicates that in exactly the same way, through the Mash Telegram channel with reference to the Anarchist Kombatant hacker group, another fake document was thrown in early November – a letter to Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal , allegedly from Minister of Health Viktor Lyashko stating that that HIV and hepatitis viruses were found in blood received from NATO countries for transfusion.
Specialists of the Center for counteracting disinformation believe that these stuffing is part of a large disinformation campaign. His statement says:
“It is important to note that the campaign is carried out at several levels, for which various fake materials and various narratives are used.
So, on separate Telegram channels, whose activities are focused on discrediting the Armed Forces of Ukraine, messages began to appear with “claims” from relatives of the missing military. These messages are intended to support the narratives that form the disinformation campaign and increase the level of trust in the next steps.
We believe that such information attacks within the framework of the campaign are aimed at testing the speed of response to the threat and identifying the key bodies involved in the elimination of such campaigns.”