The Pentagon on Monday rushed to contain the fallout from a leak of categorised intelligence paperwork concerning the struggle in Ukraine in addition to different delicate info from Asia and the Middle East.
The Department of Justice has opened a prison investigation into the leak of dozens of paperwork, and US officers are working to decide the supply of the leak and what ramifications it might have on the battlefield and on US efforts to collect intelligence.
“The Department of Defense continues to review and assess the validity of the photographed documents that are circulating on social media sites and that appear to contain sensitive and highly classified material,” Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh mentioned. “An inter-agency effort has been stood up, focused on assessing the impact these photographed documents could have on US national security and on our allies and partners.”
The extremely categorised paperwork, which officers have mentioned seem largely genuine, cowl a spread of matters, primarily relating to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
They embrace briefing slides, some that seem particularly ready for the Joint Staff on the Pentagon, whereas others appear to be intelligence merchandise included in every day briefings for different nationwide safety officers. Other than the struggle in Ukraine there are references to China, Iran, South Korea and Israel.
The paperwork level to necessary challenges for each Ukraine and Russia, and purport to present that each international locations face setbacks in coaching and equipping troops. However, they seem to point out that Ukraine’s air defences are notably weak and the nation has a dwindling provide of air defence missiles which have to this point stored Russia from deciding to tremendously contain its air drive within the struggle.
The materials additionally signifies that American intelligence has penetrated Russian navy officers on the highest stage and might achieve info to inform Ukrainian selections each day.
The paperwork, which first appeared on a messaging platform in January referred to as Discord and extra just lately circulated to different social media together with Twitter and Telegram, have sown chaos and paranoia amongst Washington’s nationwide safety equipment forward of a important second within the Ukraine struggle. Kyiv’s forces are set to quickly launch a counter-offensive in opposition to Moscow. The most up-to-date paperwork are from early March.
An element complicating the probe is that the paperwork, seen by the Financial Times, are printed out and photographed, which officers mentioned might make it more durable to hint the origin of the leak.
