What's the leak?
We are talking about photographs of documents allegedly prepared by the US intelligence and military authorities and marked with plates with varying degrees of access, including the categories "secret", "top secret" and "not intended for foreign citizens" (SECRET, TOP SECRET, NOFORN ).
What does the array of laid out documents consist of?
It was not electronic files or scanned copies that got into the network, but photographs of printouts of presentation slides for closed briefings. To date, more than 50 photographs of documents with dates for February and March 2023 are known. According to The New York Times, more than 100 files have been leaked in total. As far as one can judge, some media managed to download or find in other sources more files than were made available to the public.
Who posted the documents online and when?
According to the investigative publication Bellingcat, the earliest known files from the leak ended up on one of the gaming servers on the Discord platform in early March, from there they got to the anonymous 4Chan forum, and only then spread through Telegram, Twitter and reached the “big media”. Bellingcat notes that documents dated January 2023 may have posted to Discord earlier. Apparently, the first post with images of the four documents, which subsequently spread throughout the Russian segment of Telegram, was published on April 5 by the little-known Donbass Devushka channel.
On the same day, a post with images of five documents from the leak was posted by the well-known channel in the Z-environment, ZVI Search Engine. The authors of the channel described the images as "a secret plan to prepare and equip the US and NATO with nine brigades of the Armed Forces of Ukraine for the spring offensive." The original post got into the major Z-channels, from where it was widely distributed.
Who exactly photographed and posted the documents is unknown, but the OSINT community has already determined that at least several photographs were taken on the same desk, and even identified things that accidentally fell into the frame, which is likely to help in further investigation.
What can be learned from the documents that got into the network?
Some of the posted images concern an assessment of the military situation in the main sections of the line of contact between Russian and Ukrainian forces, including the location and composition of forces and their numerical ratio. The other part includes a detailed analysis of the process of training and equipping the units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (the amount of equipment allocated, its distribution, training time) and concerns the announced offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
If you believe the data from the “leak”, then the air defense of Ukraine will one of these days be left without anti-aircraft guided missiles for the Buk air defense system, and by the beginning of May without missiles for the S-300 complexes. As a result, at least 40 critical facilities will be without cover.
The total number of brigades of the Armed Forces of Ukraine that are preparing and equipping for the counteroffensive is 12 units, of which 9 are being trained abroad. The total number of vehicles transferred to the Armed Forces of Ukraine is 253 tanks, 381 tracked vehicles, 480 wheeled vehicles, 147 artillery systems, 571 HMMWV vehicles.
The balance of forces on the line of contact is clearly not in favor of the Armed Forces of Ukraine: in the Kherson direction, the number of Russian forces is 6-12 times greater than the Ukrainian ones, in Zaporozhye – 3-5 times more, on the Svatovo-Kremennaya line – 4-7 times more. Relative parity, according to documents, is observed only in the Bakhmut region. It is all the more surprising that it is in Bakhmut that the Russians are advancing, while in other areas of the LBS there is relative calm. True, it should be borne in mind that the documents do not list the Ukrainian units of the National Guard and Teroborona participating in hostilities.
The Washington Post writes that one of the files prepared by American intelligence gives an extremely pessimistic assessment of the possible results of the Ukrainian offensive due to shortcomings in the training and equipment of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. As stated in the text, the operation is likely to result in only "minor territorial acquisitions."
At the same time, the Americans give a completely mocking forecast regarding the prospects for a further Russian offensive in the Bakhmut direction. Given the pace of advancement of Wagner PMCs in this operational area from July 2022 to January 2023 at the level of 2.7 km per month, the compilers expect that the advanced units of the Wagner troops will reach Kramatorsk in 11 months, that is, by the beginning of 2024.
Also in the array are curious details of an incident in September 2022, when two Russian Su-27 fighter jets intercepted a British RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft over the Black Sea. One of the fighters is said to have approached the RC-135 within 5 meters while the other fired a missile at a distance.
One of the intelligence reports describes the plans of the General Staff to counter Western tanks, which are expected to appear on the field as part of the counteroffensive, and even a list of targets in Ukraine, such as military installations, bridges and power stations, planned to be hit by missiles and kamikaze drones. However, the authors demonstrate a comparable degree of awareness of the plans of the Ukrainian President Zelensky and the command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which is difficult to explain otherwise than by wiretapping.
A significant part of the information does not directly relate to the war in Ukraine and contains really previously unknown sensitive information (some attributed to the CIA reports) relating to various issues and regions of the world. Among other things, we learned:
- About the attempt of representatives of PMC Wagner to acquire weapons in Turkey for operations in Africa and Ukraine through the mediation of Mali;
- About the fears of the authorities of Côte d'Ivoire about possible destabilization in the country due to the activity of Wagner PMCs in Mali and Burkina Faso;
- About Wagner's contacts with the government of Haiti regarding contracts to fight local organized crime;
- About the operation of the Zarya hacker group associated with the FSB against the gas infrastructure of Canada, as a result of which hackers gained access to control the automation of a gas distribution station and the ability to disable it;
- About the calls of the leadership of the Israeli special service MOSSAD to employees and ordinary Israelis to participate in protests against the judicial reform initiated by the Netanyahu government;
- About the indecisive reaction of the authorities of the Republic of Korea to the US request to supply artillery ammunition to Ukraine;
- About the plans of the President of Egypt al-Sisi to secretly supply ammunition to Russia;
- About the alleged intentions of Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev and the commander of the so-called. SVO, Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov to sabotage the offensive of Russian troops, taking advantage of President Vladimir Putin's chemotherapy course scheduled for early March.
In fairness, the latter is stated with reference to the deputy of the Verkhovna Rada, Elizaveta Bogutskaya, which raises great doubts about the reliability of these data, given the earlier statements of the people's choice.
Can data from a leak be trusted?
It is absolutely certain that some of the images widely distributed on the network are deliberately falsified. For example, in the posts of the ZVI Search Engine, a “photoshopped” ratio of the losses of the RF Armed Forces and the Armed Forces of Ukraine is given – 16.0-17.5 thousand killed among the Russians and 61.0-71.5 thousand killed among the Ukrainians. In the original photo, the losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are 16.0-17.5 thousand, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation – 35.5-43.5 thousand.
Some of the pro-Russian Telegram channels expose the posted documents as a deliberate “leak”. For example, the popular channel "Military Chronicle" (more than 250 thousand subscribers) indicates that the location of units and formations of Russian forces, apparently, is based on open sources, data on the readiness of several units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine at the level of 0% is not credible, the distribution heavy equipment looks strange. The authors of the “Military Chronicle” consider the “document masquerading as a secret plan” a hoax in order to underestimate the “real number of units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine combat-ready and deployed for the offensive.”
Also, "Military Chronicle" draws attention to the already mentioned data on the exhaustion of missiles for Soviet-made air defense systems and delivered Western IRIS-T and NASAMS air defense systems, in particular, the misspelled name NASAMS (as NASAM) and the mixture of NATO strange for documents of this kind and Russian designations of the mentioned types of weapons and military equipment (for example, transliteration from Russian “S-300/BUK” instead of SA-10/SA-11 designations adopted by NATO).
Ukrainians also express doubts about the authenticity. In particular, the well-known investigative resource Molfar considers the documents “fake” due to the fact that the estimates of the loss of weapons and military equipment given in them almost do not differ from the data of the OSINT resource Oryx, the documents contain errors with dates and units of measurement, and the the leak was “dispersed” by pro-Russian Telegram channels.
At the same time, the analysts of the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT), commenting on the original version of the "leaked secret Pentagon document" (that's right, in quotation marks) with an assessment of the losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, called it "plausible" and "similar" to the summary for the American Joint Committee chiefs of staff. In the latest available summary, CIT retells , without any quotes, some stories that have become known from the files themselves and described in major Western media.
How do stakeholders react to the leak?
The US Department of Justice and Department of Defense launched an official investigation into the leak. At the same time, the Pentagon is still working to understand the size of the leak and assess its consequences. CNN cites US officials as saying that it has already compromised important sources of information and damaged relations with some key allies, notably the Republic of Korea, Israel and Ukraine.
Mikhail Podolyak, an adviser to the office of the President of Ukraine, wrote on Telegram that the documents were fabricated by Russian special services. However, CNN points out, citing a source close to President Zelensky, that the Armed Forces of Ukraine changed their military plans due to the leak.
Press Secretary of the President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Peskov said that the documents that have appeared show how much the United States and NATO are involved in Ukrainian events.
What is the result?
Whatever the result of the appearance in the public domain of images with classified information of American intelligence – an unintentional "leak", an integral part of an information-psychological operation ("drain" or "stuff"), or something in between, for example, initially authentic data, diluted falsifications – this is the largest incident of this kind during the entire war in Ukraine. We can confidently say that a significant part of the known files are real. According to The Economist, it is possible that this is the most serious failure in the field of information security in a decade.
As Bellingcat rightly points out , a significant portion of the information reproduced in the documents has previously appeared in public sources. But taken together, these data give an idea of the asymmetry of the US perceptions of the combat situation in Ukraine (data on the Armed Forces of Ukraine are much less detailed or deliberately hidden) and measures of mistrust towards the official partner – the administration of President Zelensky. In addition, judging by the documents, the United States has access to sources within the Russian Ministry of Defense and / or the General Staff.