Russia is not likely to be behind the leak of the top secret US intelligence assessment of the situation in Ukraine, since it would prefer to keep the information under wraps and use it to its advantage, a major Chinese outlet speculates.
“If Russia has obtained these classified documents, it would not post them online, because this will make Russia lose the source or sources that had provided these documents,” an anonymous Chinese international security and intelligence expert told the Global Times. “The leak is unlikely caused by Russian intelligence agencies, because this does not make sense,” the expert said.
The source argued that there was “no reason for Russia to let its enemies know that it has obtained this intelligence, because this will also make its enemies change plans, making the hard-won military intelligence useless.”
Instead, GT noted, the leak goes to show to the world the “disunity, distrust and divergences” between the US, its allies and Kiev, and to demonstrate that Washington “is the biggest obstacle for the international community to promote a ceasefire and peace talks” to ending the Ukrainian crisis.
The documents demonstrate the precarious state of the Ukrainian military, and will both demoralize the Ukrainian military and reduce Western countries’ confidence in supporting Kiev against Russia, whether or not they are genuine, the Chinese newspaper suggested.
Whodunit?
US and Ukrainian officials immediately blamed Russian intelligence for the leak of the classified documents, and suggested that the assessment seems to combine a “statistical analysis of supplies, possible operational and tactical plans, as well as a large volume of fictitious information.”
The documents serve to confirm Russia’s public assessment on the state of the Ukrainian conflict, showing that Ukrainian air defenses have been depleted by months of strikes, and that Ukrainian casualties are over four times higher than those of the Russian side (contrasting sharply with public estimates by the Pentagon and the Ukrainian military of six-figure Russian losses).
The Pentagon’s reported efforts to scrub the documents from the internet were met with trolling by Twitter CEO Elon Musk, who sarcastically quipped that it was “totally” possible to “delete things from the internet,” and that doing so definitely wouldn’t “draw attention to whatever you were trying to hide.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the leaks “quite interesting,” and said it was not surprising that Moscow has been blamed. “You and I know that there is a tendency to always blame everything on Russia. It is, in general, a disease,” the spokesman told reporters Monday.
Commentators speaking to Sputnik expressed a healthy measure of a skepticism over the documents’ authenticity, saying that although they serve to confirm Russia’s internal assessments on the state of the Ukrainian military, the provide Moscow “no benefit” as far as the strategic situation is concerned. Others pointed out that it would be highly unlikely for the documents to be published in legacy media outlets without the approval of the national security state.