New leak of classified documents concerning, in part, Ukraine discovered in US – media

This was reported by The New York Times.

The new leak of classified information has worried the US Department of Defense and added to the unease of a situation that seems to have caught Joe Biden's administration by surprise, the newspaper writes.

Analysts said that more than 100 documents could have been leaked online. The scale of the leak, coupled with the sensitivity of the documents themselves, could cause enormous damage, US officials said.

A senior US intelligence official called the leak "a nightmare for the Five Eyes Group," referring to the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, which actively share intelligence information, the NYT reports.

It is noted that the new documents were found on Twitter and other sites on April 7, a day after the Biden administration said it was investigating a potential leak of secret Ukrainian military plans.

One of the slides, dated February 23, is marked "Secret/NoForn," meaning it is not intended to be shared with other countries, the newspaper reports.

Former senior Pentagon official Mick Mulroy said the leaked classified documents are a "significant security breach" that could hamper Ukraine's military planning.

“As many of these were pictures of documents, it appears that it was a deliberate leak done by someone that wished to damage the Ukraine, US, and NATO efforts,” he said.

He called the published documents "the tip of the iceberg".

“Even as officials at the Pentagon and national security agencies were investigating the source of documents that had appeared on Twitter and on Telegram, another surfaced on 4chan, an anonymous, fringe message board. The 4chan document is a map that purports to show the status of the war in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, the scene of a fierce, monthslong battle. But the leaked documents appear to go well beyond highly classified material on Ukraine war plans,” the newspaper writes.

Security experts who have reviewed the documents leaked on social media say that this portion of the documents also contains confidential slides on China, the India-Pacific theater of operations, the Middle East and terrorism.

Behind closed doors, the NYT reports, national security officials are trying to find the culprit. One official said that the documents probably did not come from the Ukrainian side, as it did not have access to the specific plans, which are marked by the Pentagon's Joint Staff offices. The second official said that it will be possible to determine how the documents were leaked once it is determined which officials had access to them.

An analyst at the Dutch investigative website Bellingcat, Aric Toler, said that the first part of the documents was published in early March on Discord, a social media chat platform popular among video game fans.

Lieutenant Colonel Yurii Bereza, commander of a battalion of the National Guard of Ukraine, believes that such news about the leakage of information should not be paid attention to. He noted that the information war is so intense that "we can no longer determine where the truth is and where the lies are," the NYT adds.

• As a reminder, this is the second case of classified information leakage in the United States. The first one happened the day before and concerned documents on the preparation of a counteroffensive by Ukraine.