A Ukrainian serviceman takes cover in a trench during shelling next to a 105mm howitzer near the embattled city of Bakhmut, on March 8, 2023

Paul D. Shinkman – US News and World Report April 7, 2023

One of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s surrogates suggested Friday that leaked U.S. war plans for Ukraine that appeared on social media are actually an act of American disinformation, muddying an issue that already has prompted widespread confusion about the state of the conflict.

“This is a classical information special operation,” Vladimir Rogov, Ukraine-based chairman of the so-called We Are Together With Russia movement tasked with executing Putin’s vision for assimilating the former Soviet state, told Russian state news early Friday.

Rogov, who is based in Zaporizhzhya, home to a nuclear power plant frequently in the line of fire, cited a particular detail visible in the photographs of the supposed leaked documents widely circulating on Twitter and Telegram that indicate Ukraine is prepared to mobilize tens of thousands of new troops to push toward the front lines. He said claims such as these are designed to telegraph to Russia that Ukrainian forces “are not ready yet” and that pro-Russian troops “can still relax.”

“There is quite possibly some truth in this” claim, Rogov said, “but regarding the timing, this is definitely not the case.”

Speculation has swirled about the veracity of the leaked planning documents dated early last month that appear to show the U.S. and NATO assessment of the Russian and Ukrainian sides – including their respective battlefield losses – and how the West plans to prepare Kyiv for the hotly anticipated spring offensive. Many analysts believe that campaign will decide the future of Russia’s invasion and its attempts to break the burgeoning and embarrassing deadlock.

Several military analysts told The New York Times that the documents appear to have been manipulated, likely by Russia, to overstate U.S. assessments of how many Ukrainians have been killed in battle and downplay the number of Russian war dead.

f real, the documents would represent a rare and troubling release of classified information prepared by the intelligence office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff based at the Pentagon, working with the Defense Intelligence Agency, and tasked with overseeing the most sensitive global military affairs.

Though the documents do not reveal any acute actionable intelligence, such as plans for particular offensives or battlefield maneuvers, they do, for example, appear to reveal the rate by which Ukrainian troops are expending sophisticated Western-supplied HIMARS artillery rockets – a number the Pentagon has otherwise guarded closely for fear of revealing vulnerabilities in Kyiv’s ability to resupply its forward-based forces.

The Pentagon is nonetheless investigating the apparent leak, and the White House has – unsuccessfully as of Friday morning – appealed to Twitter and Telegram to take down the posts.

Top officials for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government vigorously attempted to distance its operations from the leaked documents on Friday and piled on to claims of disinformation. Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser, told Fox News in a statement that the intelligence assessments “are related exclusively to the information and operational game that the Russians started in order to introduce confusion, seize the initiative and discredit the very idea of offensive.”

He said the details about Ukrainian weaponry are related to general assessments of how those particular systems are supposed to function, and he claimed that assessments of Ukrainian and Russian force levels are “deliberately distorted” in favor of the Kremlin in an attempt to spread fear among Ukraine’s citizens and their international backers.

“All this is a pure and banal propaganda fiction: one has only to open a real news report from the front and see that only Russia suffers situational defeats along the entire front line and does not have any significant successes,” Podolyak concluded.

Despite these assurances, Zelenskyy and his top officials are looking for ways to clamp down on intelligence leaks, Reuters reported. A meeting of the members of the president’s office, according to a statement, “focused on measures to prevent the leakage of information” about Ukrainian forces.

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