A day after the Pentagon said it was investigating how classified Western plans to aid Ukraine’s military against Russia were published on social media, each side suggested that the leak was part of a disinformation effort by the other, timed to influence a possible offensive by Kyiv’s forces this spring.
A senior Ukrainian official said on Friday that the leak of U.S. and NATO war plans appeared to be a Russian ploy to “discredit” a counteroffensive. And Russia’s pro-war military bloggers warned against trusting any information in the documents, with one blogger saying the leak could be the work of “Western intelligence in order to mislead our command.”
The responses to the leak, which The New York Times reported on Thursday, pointed to the intense mutual suspicions that Russia and Ukraine harbor about each other after more than a year of bitter fighting. They also added to the feverish speculation — in Ukraine and Russia as well as in Western capitals — about when and where Kyiv might launch a counteroffensive to retake land seized by Moscow’s forces.
The classified American and NATO documents, which were posted this week on social media, include “absolutely none of the actual plans for Ukraine’s counteroffensive operations” and are full of “fictional information,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, said in a statement to The Times.
“There is not the smallest doubt that this is yet another element of hybrid warfare,” he said. “Russia is trying to influence Ukrainian society, sow fear, panic, mistrust and doubt. It’s typical behavior.”
Lt. Col. Yurii Bereza, a battalion commander with Ukraine’s National Guard whose forces have fought in the country’s east in recent months, shrugged off news of the leak. He noted that information warfare between Russia and Ukraine was so dense that “we can no longer determine where is the truth and where is the lie.”
“We are at that stage of the war when the information war is sometimes even more important than the direct physical clashes at the front,” Colonel Bereza said.
Still, there were signs that Ukraine’s military was taking steps to respond to the disclosures. On Friday, during a regular meeting with military brass to discuss battlefield developments, President Volodymyr Zelensky and the commanders “focused on measures to prevent the leakage of information regarding the plans of the defense forces of Ukraine,” his office said in a statement.
The leaked documents — which detail American and NATO plans for building up the Ukrainian military before a counteroffensive that U.S. officials have said could begin in the next month or so — appeared on Twitter and on Telegram, a platform with more than half a billion users that is widely available in Russia. They do not provide specific battle plans, and because they are five weeks old, they offer only a snapshot of time — the American and Ukrainian view, as of March 1, of what Ukrainian troops might need for the campaign.
Military analysts said the documents also appeared to have been modified in certain parts from their original format, overstating American estimates of Ukrainian war dead and understating estimates of Russian troops killed. Analysts said those modifications could point to an effort of disinformation by Moscow.
But several influential Russian military bloggers, a group that closely follows the war, expressed skepticism about the documents, noting that the leak had occurred just as both sides are preparing for heavier fighting.
A post on Grey Zone, a Telegram channel associated with the Wagner militia, said: “We should not exclude the high probability that such a leak of classified information at the exact moment of the intensification of hostilities, and after the fact of the accomplished events displayed in the documents, is disinformation of Western intelligence in order to mislead our command to identify the enemy’s strategy in the upcoming counteroffensive.”
Another military blogger known by the pseudonym Starshe Eddy said that Ukraine and its allies were trying to add to the “fog of war.” “And always remember that NATO’s intelligence structures today work directly and directly in the interests of Ukraine,” he posted on Telegram.
Still, the disclosures in the leaked documents — which appear as photographs of charts of anticipated weapons deliveries, troop and battalion strengths, and other plans — represent a significant breach of American intelligence in the effort to aid Ukraine. Biden administration officials were working to get them deleted but had not succeeded as of Thursday evening.
The documents mention, for instance, the expenditure rate of HIMARS — American-supplied high-mobility artillery rocket systems that can launch attacks against targets like ammunition dumps, infrastructure and concentrations of troops from a distance. The Pentagon has not said publicly how quickly Ukrainian troops are using the HIMARS munitions; the documents do.
On Thursday, before The Times’s article was published, the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council said that only a handful of people knew when or where any counteroffensive would take place.
“When this or that military action, this or that military operation begins, as of today I can tell you with confidence that this is information for a very limited circle of people,” the official, Oleksiy Danilov, said in an interview with Radio Liberty. “When it begins, you will see it all,” he said, adding that “this question is completely closed for today.”
Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Natalia Yermak contributed reporting.
