WORLD NEWS | Pentagon examines whether Ukraine war documents were leaked

WASHINGTON, April 8 (AP) — The Defense Department is reviewing documents posted on several social media sites that appear to detail U.S. and NATO aid to Ukraine but may have been altered or used as an error part of the information campaign.

Posted on sites such as Twitter, the documents are marked as classified, similar to the routine updates that the U.S. military’s Joint Staff produces daily but does not distribute publicly.

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They range in date from February 23 to March 1, and provide details of the progress of weapons and equipment into Ukraine in a more precise timeline and quantity than the US typically provides publicly.

They are not war plans and do not provide details of any planned Ukrainian offensive. Some inaccuracies — including estimates of Russian military deaths that are far lower than publicly released figures by U.S. officials — have led some to question the authenticity of the documents.

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“It is very important that the most successful operations of Russian special forces in recent decades have been carried out in Photoshop,” Andriy Yusov, a spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence service, said on Ukrainian television. In these materials, we see false and distorted figures of losses on both sides, some of which are collected from publicly available sources. “

However, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office issued a statement on Friday about his meeting with senior military advisers, noting that “discussions focused on preventing the leakage of Wehrmacht program information Measure Ukraine.”

However, if the published documents are somehow authentic, the leak of classified data is troubling and raises questions about how other information about the war in Ukraine — or any impending offensive — might be disseminated. On Friday, U.S. officials did not specify where the documents came from, their authenticity or who first posted them online.

The New York Times first reported the documents.

Sabrina Singh, a Pentagon spokeswoman, would say only, “We are aware of reports of social media posts and the Department of Defense is reviewing the matter.”

A U.S. official said the documents were similar to data generated by the Joint Staff on a daily basis, though some numbers were wrong. Even if they were legitimate, the official said, the U.S. viewed the documents as having little real intelligence value because much of it was information Russia already knew or could glean from the battlefield. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, discussed the intelligence documents.

The chart depicts some battlefield conditions on both sides a month ago, the movement of the US military in the past 24 hours, the number of personnel and local weather conditions.

But there are errors. Under a section titled “Total Assessed Loss,” one document listed 16,000-17,500 Russian casualties and as many as 71,000 Ukrainian casualties. General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said publicly last November that Russia had lost “well in excess” of 100,000 troops and Ukraine had lost about the same number. Those estimates have continued to climb in recent months, though officials have stopped providing more precise figures. (Associated Press)

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