The leak of a trove of extremely delicate paperwork on-line might be a transfer by the United States to “deceive” Russia, its deputy Foreign Minister was quoted as saying Wednesday.
“It’s probably interesting for someone to look at these documents, if they really are documents or they could be a fake or it could be an intentional leak,” Sergei Ryabkov instructed Russian information businesses.
“Since the U.S. is a party to the (Ukraine) conflict and is essentially waging a hybrid war against us, it is possible that such techniques are being used to deceive their opponent, the Russian Federation,” he mentioned.
The breach — which has sparked a felony investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice — contains categorized details about Ukraine’s combat towards Russian forces, in addition to secret assessments of U.S. allies.
A doc reviewed by AFP highlighted U.S. issues about Ukraine’s capability to maintain defending towards Russian strikes, whereas the Washington Post reported that one other expressed doubts concerning the success of an upcoming offensive by Kyiv’s forces.
The Guardian newspaper mentioned that in a single doc US officers estimated that there have been 97 particular forces members from NATO nations energetic in Ukraine at one level, together with 50 British troops.
Dozens of images of paperwork — a few of which additionally level to U.S. spying on allies and companions together with Israel, South Korea and Ukraine — have been discovered on Twitter, Telegram, Discord and different websites in latest days, although some might have been circulating on-line for a while.
Many of the paperwork are now not obtainable on the websites the place they first appeared, and Washington is reportedly working to have them eliminated.
Source: www.thehindu.com