WASHINGTON (NY Times) – Classified war documents detailing secret U.S. and NATO plans for building up the Ukrainian military before a planned offensive against Russia were posted this week on social media channels, senior U.S. officials said.
The Pentagon is investigating who may have been behind the leak of the documents, which appeared on Twitter and on Telegram, a platform with more than half a billion users that is widely available in Russia.
According to the U.S.-based daily, one of the documents summarized the training schedules of 12 Ukraine combat brigades and added that nine of them were being trained by U.S. and NATO forces, further pointing out that 250 tanks and more than 350 mechanized vehicles were needed for the effort.
The report stated that information in the documents also details expenditure rates for munitions under Ukraine military control, including for the HIMARS rocket systems, the U.S.-made artillery weapon widely publicized in Western media reports as being highly effective against Russian forces.
It further noted that the documents -- at least one of which carried a “top secret” label -- were circulated on pro-Russian government channels.
The report quoted military analysts as claiming that some of the documents appear to have been altered in a “disinformation campaign” by Russia, claiming that in one document deaths of Ukrainian troopers were inflated while Russian battlefield losses were minimized.
The daily also cited officials as saying that the information in the documents is at least five weeks old, with the most recent dated March 1.
The development came amid persisting U.S.-led efforts to send more weapons to Ukraine to further escalate the military campaign against Russia.
The U.S. has so far pledged more than $35.2 billion worth of military aid to Ukraine since February 2021, when Russia began a military operation in the former Soviet republic, insisting that it was aimed at defending the pro-Russian population in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.
Russian officials have repeatedly warned Western countries against supplying weapons to Ukraine, saying it risks prolonging the already protracted war.
In January, the speaker of Russia’s parliament warned that countries supplying Ukraine with more powerful weapons risked their own destruction.
Ukraine formally applied for NATO membership last year, following the outbreak of the war with Russia. So did Finland and Sweden — the former having joined the alliance earlier this week.