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<\/p>\n
One of Russian President Vladimir Putin\u2019s 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a classical information special operation,\u201d Vladimir Rogov, Ukraine-based chairman of the so-called We Are Together With Russia movement tasked with executing Putin\u2019s vision for assimilating the former Soviet state, told Russian state news early Friday.<\/p>\n Rogov, who is based in Zaporizhzhya, home to a nuclear power plant frequently in the line of fire<\/a>, 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 \u201care not ready yet\u201d and that pro-Russian troops \u201ccan still relax.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere is quite possibly some truth in this\u201d claim, Rogov said, \u201cbut regarding the timing, this is definitely not the case.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 including their respective battlefield losses \u2013 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\u2019s invasion and its attempts to break the burgeoning and embarrassing deadlock.<\/p>\n Several military analysts told The New York Times<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 a number the Pentagon has otherwise guarded closely for fear of revealing vulnerabilities in Kyiv\u2019s ability to resupply its forward-based forces.<\/p>\n The Pentagon is nonetheless investigating the apparent leak, and the White House has \u2013 unsuccessfully as of Friday morning \u2013 appealed to Twitter and Telegram to take down the posts.<\/p>\n Top officials for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy\u2019s 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<\/a> in a statement that the intelligence assessments \u201care 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u201cdeliberately distorted\u201d in favor of the Kremlin in an attempt to spread fear among Ukraine\u2019s citizens and their international backers.<\/p>\n \u201cAll 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,\u201d Podolyak concluded.<\/p>\n Despite these assurances, Zelenskyy and his top officials are looking for ways to clamp down on intelligence leaks, Reuters<\/a> reported. A meeting of the members of the president\u2019s office, according to a statement, \u201cfocused on measures to prevent the leakage of information\u201d about Ukrainian forces.<\/p>\n