Russians charged with leaking secret documents on war in Ukraine

Officials in Kiev, meanwhile, warned that the documents were changed by the Russians, in part to cover the real mass of victims suffered by Moscow forces and increase the number of Ukrainians they killed.

Photos of the documents labeled “te for secret” and “secret” were posted on Twitter and Telegram the last few days. The files include graphics and maps showing the whereabouts of the military forces and weapons in Ukraine since March 1st and appear to have been distributed on the internet since that day.

“We are aware of the reports of postings in social media and the department is looking into the matter”, the US Department of Defence said in a statement.

A Pentagon official insisted on the Voice of America that there was no official investigation, despite news reports on the contrary.

This fact was the first public intelligence discovery for Russia since it invaded Ukraine at the end of February 2022, according to The New York Times, which initially reported the flow of information Thursday.

The Times reported on Friday evening that a second set of documents had appeared in social media that “seems to detail the secrets of American national security from Ukraine, the Middle East to China”.

The first group of documents also contains specific information about the training schedules for Ukraine's war brigades and the level of expenditures for the HIMARS missile system that the United States has provided ahead of Kiev's expected spring counteroffensions, according to media reports.

“I don't see any danger from publishing this information, including distorted information about plans being developed by Ukraine's General Staff,” told the Ukrainian American Voice Service, Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine's president. “They are insignificant about what will function in a month or at a certain time when these scenarios will be implemented on the battlefield. ”

Mr. Podolyak added that if the documents were completely authentic, the Russians “would probably not publish them. They wouldn't pretend you didn't know the plans. ”

A modified graph lists Russian deaths at 16,000 to 17,500, well below reliable estimates of up to 200,000 killed, injured or missing by numerous analysts.

The modified <x0). And this shows that the main reason for this is to convince the Russian public that only 17,000 Russian soldiers have died,” said Andrey Piontkovsky, senior associate at the Modern Russia Institute, headquartered in New York.

“This is a propagandistic operation designed primarily for Russian public opinion,”, Mr. Piontkovsky told the Russian Voice of America Service on Friday, adding that what has been published contains no “no detailed harmful military information”.

Several Russian military bloggers are pointing their finger in the other direction, claiming the documents were discovered by Western intelligence to deceive Russian commanders ahead of the upcoming Ukrainian counterattack.

Such a warning was posted on Telegram by the Green Zone account, which is linked to the Russian paramilitary force known as the Wagner Group.

More than 30 of the documents first appeared on a Discard server on March 1st and 2nd, according to Aric Toler, a researcher in Bellingcat, an intelligence group for controlling the facts and open sources based in the Netherlands. Discord is a popular voice, video and text communication service based in San Francisco.

“They were all photographed by copies printed”, as one person's hand in the photo, said Mr. Toler for the Voice of America on Friday.

Until March 5th, after they spread to other Discward servers and to the anonymous bulletin board 4chan, a regulated document and others apparently unchanged were posted on Russian channels of the telegram, according to Mr. Toler.

US government officials have demanded that social media companies erase the posts, though it is not known when they were first informed of the leak. It is also not known how successful they were in deleting documents or how Twitter responded to the request.

An e-mailed question from the Voice of America on Friday on the social media platform generated an automated response with a name “poop”, the latest Twitter standard answer to all media questions.

A number of documents were still visible on Twitter since Friday afternoon, with some collecting hundreds of thousands of views.