Leaked Pentagon documents on Ukraine apparently posted to video game chatroom
(CNN) — The fallout from the leak of what appears to be classified U.S. military documents on the war in Ukraine took a bizarre turn Friday as evidence surfaced that versions of the documents had been posted over a month ago to a video game-focused chatroom on social media.
Images of some of the documents — which include estimates of Russian casualties and a list of Western weapons systems available to Ukraine — were posted to the social media platform Discord in early March, according to screenshots of the posts reviewed by CNN.
“This sh*t was sitting in a Minecraft Discord server for a month and no one noticed,” Aric Toler, a researcher at investigative outlet Bellingcat who traced the timeline of the posted documents, told CNN. Minecraft is a popular video game.
It wasn’t until this week that the leaked documents started to gain more attention after someone posted a portion of the documents to 4chan, a web forum popular with extremists, and then a Russian speaker posted an altered version of one of the documents on Telegram, Toler said.
U.S. officials believe someone altered that document to make the estimated number of Ukrainians killed in the war far higher than it actually is.
The Pentagon said Thursday that it was aware of the social media posts and it was investigating the matter.
On Discord Friday, speculation and paranoia were rife, with some users wondering if they could get in trouble for re-posting the documents now that the U.S. government is investigating the matter. A user who posted photos of the documents on March 1 appeared to have deleted his accounts on Twitter and Discord.
“The fact that unedited and edited — doctored — versions of some files are available online makes me skeptical that this is a professional Russian intelligence operation,” Thomas Rid, an expert on state-backed information operations, told CNN.
Historically, if an intelligence agency has access to classified material from an adversary and decides to falsify some of the material, they typically don’t make both versions of those documents public, said Rid, who is a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
“That only makes it easier to detect the facts, and thus defeats the purpose,” Rid said.