The ‘leaked war plans’ could prove embarrassing for the US – but useful for Russia
Top Secret documents detailing the state of readiness of Ukraine’s forces as well as detailed planning information around equipment inflow, weather, ammunition expenditure, training and much more have been circulating on Telegram and Twitter.
The documents titled “Russia / Ukraine | Status of the Conflict as of 1 Mar” appears to be a daily briefing document with a classification higher than top secret, giving clues to the sources of the information within it, and a caveat of “NOFORN,” which means No Foreign Dissemination, so for US eyes only.
Some of the pages have lesser classifications and are designed for release to Ukraine.
The detail contained could be useful to the Russians, as there are two things related to any Ukrainian counteroffensive that the Russians need to know.
The first is: when will Ukrainian forces be ready?
And this document gives very clear indications as to when that would be. However, it doesn’t say what the second factor could be, the where? That is a closely held secret inside the Ukrainian military planning staff.
However, there is more than one version of the document circulating, and this gives the suspicion that one version at least could be disinformation.
The information seems to be focused on assessed Russian casualty statistics, with the doctored document suggesting the Russians have only lost 17,500 personnel, when British Military Intelligence assess between 40-60,000 Russians have been killed, and the Ukrainians claim they have killed over 170,000 Russian military personnel. The doctored version increases assessments of Ukrainian dead.
With any document, especially with the classifications, access to it should be, and usually is, carefully controlled.
A leak like this is highly unusual.
The ancient 6th-century Chinese general and philosopher Sun Tzu in the book The Art of War says: “All warfare is deception, and all deception is warfare.”
During the Second World War, the Allies ran Operation Mincemeat to get the most secret plans for the invasion of southern Europe to Hitler’s desk, convincing him that any invasion would come through Greece and Sardinia, and not Sicily. The rest is history.
If the documents are genuine, then this is a major embarrassment for the US, and a rapid counter-intelligence operation will be running.
The classifications used have so many control mechanisms that mean there should never be a chance for it to leak.
On its own, it gives the Russians insights into what they may face from the Ukrainians, but that is only useful if the Russians have the wherewithal to counter a Ukrainian attack.
They are struggling already, and I suspect they don’t have the flexibility to make a real difference.
The Ukrainians kept their actions around Kharkiv, and then Kherson, secret last year, and I am certain the coming Ukrainian counterattack will have been very carefully planned and will be expertly executed.
It is the Ukrainians who will dictate the location and the exact timing, and this leak won’t affect that.
