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Britain’s elite special forces and dozens more Western military personnel are on the ground in Ukraine, a trove of intelligence documents circulating online implies.
The latest revelation on the contents of “top secret” Pentagon papers comes as the UK’s Ministry of Defence warned the documents “demonstrated a serious level of inaccuracy” and after Kyiv dismissed them as fake.
The extent to which information contained in the leak had been doctored remained uncertain, however the level of concern from United States officials was telling.
Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, and Lloyd Austin, Defence Secretary, were on Tuesday night in talks with their Ukrainian counterparts amid a Pentagon investigation into how the classified war documents – which reveal Nato plans to support Ukraine ahead of its offensive against Russia – ended up on social media.
Asked whether Washington was effectively waiting for more classified documents to show up online, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby replied: “The truth and the honest answer to your question is: We don’t know. And is that a matter of concern to us? You’re darn right it is.”
Russian propagandists have gloated over the tranche of papers that could be used by Moscow to affirm suspicions Nato is directly involved in the war.
A March 23 intelligence document reportedly states the UK has 50 special forces in the war-torn country.
The report lists Latvia as having 17 elite military personnel in Ukraine, France 15, the US 14 and the Netherlands one person, according to the BBC and The Guardian.
The Ministry of Defence said in a tweet on Tuesday night: “Readers should be cautious about taking at face value allegations that have the potential to spread misinformation.”
France’s Le Monde newspaper reported on Saturday the French government had denied its soldiers were in Ukraine.
“There are no French forces engaged in operations in Ukraine,” Armed Forces Minister Sébastien Lecornu said.
The provenance of the leak has been traced back to a chatroom on Discord, a social media platform popular with gamers.
According to one member of the chat, an unidentified poster shared documents that were allegedly classified, first typing them out with the poster’s own thoughts, then, as of a few months ago, beginning to post images of papers with folds in them.
The posts appear to have gone unnoticed outside of the chat until a few weeks ago, when they began to circulate more widely via Russian social media.
A Telegram channel linked closely to Russia’s FSB security services had boasted on Friday of a “first breakthrough for Russian intelligence” when it published photos of the leaked documents.
It said that the five documents, marked as “top secret” gave away valuable intelligence ahead of Ukraine’s spring counter-offensive, adding: “In particular, there were graphs of the expected supply of weapons, the number of troops and the consumption of ammunition.”
But Twitter users also noticed that the photos of the documents published by Russian Telegram channels appeared to have been altered.
A Pentagon spokesman confirmed “it does appear that slides have been doctored” and military analysts said modifications included exaggerating American estimates of Ukrainian war deaths and understating estimates of Russian troops killed.
