(Trends Wide) — The fallout from the leak of what appear to be classified US military documents about the war in Ukraine took a bizarre turn on Friday, when evidence emerged that versions of the documents had been posted more than a month ago in a chat room focused on in video games on social networks.
Images of some of the documents, which include Russian casualty estimates and a list of Western weapons systems available to Ukraine, were posted to Discord in early March, according to screenshots of the posts reviewed by Trends Wide.
“This sh** was on a Minecraft Discord server for a month and no one noticed,” Aric Toler, a researcher at the investigative outlet Bellingcat who tracked down the timeline of the published documents, told Trends Wide. Minecraft is a popular video game.
It wasn’t until this week that the leaked documents began to gain more attention after someone posted a portion of the documents on 4chan, a popular web forum among extremists, and then a Russian-speaking user posted an altered version of one of them. the documents on Telegram, Toler said.
US officials believe that someone altered that document to make the estimated number of Ukrainian war dead much higher than it actually is.
The Pentagon said Thursday that it was aware of the social media posts and was investigating the matter.
Speculation and paranoia abounded on Discord on Friday, with some users wondering if they could get in trouble for reposting the documents now that the US government is investigating the situation. A user who posted photos of the documents on March 1 appeared to have deleted his Twitter and Discord accounts.
“The fact that raw and redacted (manipulated) versions of some files are available online makes me skeptical that this is a professional Russian intelligence operation,” Thomas Rid, a Russian-backed information operations expert, told Trends Wide. state.
Historically, if an intelligence agency has access to an adversary’s classified material and decides to falsify some of the material, they typically don’t make both versions of those documents public, said Rid, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. .
“That just makes it easier to spot the facts and therefore defeats the purpose,” Rid explained.
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(Trends Wide) — The fallout from the leak of what appear to be classified US military documents about the war in Ukraine took a bizarre turn on Friday, when evidence emerged that versions of the documents had been posted more than a month ago in a chat room focused on in video games on social networks.
Images of some of the documents, which include Russian casualty estimates and a list of Western weapons systems available to Ukraine, were posted to Discord in early March, according to screenshots of the posts reviewed by Trends Wide.
“This sh** was on a Minecraft Discord server for a month and no one noticed,” Aric Toler, a researcher at the investigative outlet Bellingcat who tracked down the timeline of the published documents, told Trends Wide. Minecraft is a popular video game.
It wasn’t until this week that the leaked documents began to gain more attention after someone posted a portion of the documents on 4chan, a popular web forum among extremists, and then a Russian-speaking user posted an altered version of one of them. the documents on Telegram, Toler said.
US officials believe that someone altered that document to make the estimated number of Ukrainian war dead much higher than it actually is.
The Pentagon said Thursday that it was aware of the social media posts and was investigating the matter.
Speculation and paranoia abounded on Discord on Friday, with some users wondering if they could get in trouble for reposting the documents now that the US government is investigating the situation. A user who posted photos of the documents on March 1 appeared to have deleted his Twitter and Discord accounts.
“The fact that raw and redacted (manipulated) versions of some files are available online makes me skeptical that this is a professional Russian intelligence operation,” Thomas Rid, a Russian-backed information operations expert, told Trends Wide. state.
Historically, if an intelligence agency has access to an adversary’s classified material and decides to falsify some of the material, they typically don’t make both versions of those documents public, said Rid, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. .
“That just makes it easier to spot the facts and therefore defeats the purpose,” Rid explained.
