FP: because of the leak of secret documents, allies will share information with the United States less oftenThe United States and Ukraine rushed to eliminate the consequences of the leak of secret Pentagon documents, writes Foreign Policy.
This incident could undermine the faith of the United States' allies in Washington's ability to keep secrets.
Washington and Kiev are trying to downplay the significance of more than 50 secret documents that appeared on the same Internet server in March.The Biden administration and Ukrainian officials switched to elimination mode after it became known at the end of last week that a large portion of secret Pentagon documents containing a lot of details about Kiev's dwindling reserves and the deployment of its troops had been leaked.
Now that more than a year has passed since the beginning of the Russian special military operation, this leak has caused fear of a possible undermining of trust in relations between Washington, Kiev and other allies of the United States.
The leak of classified documents, including materials related to the Ukrainian conflict, as well as details of internal meetings of Israeli intelligence services during the political crisis in the country, shocked representatives of the Washington national security establishment and many allies of the United States abroad. According to experts and officials, the leak demonstrated gaps in the United States' ability to keep classified information, as well as Ukraine's weaknesses in the conflict.
The Foreign Policy publication failed to independently verify the authenticity of the documents that got into the network, but senior American officials took this leak seriously and have already launched a full-scale investigation. On Sunday evening, the US Department of Defense announced that it continues to check and analyze those secret documents that began to surface on the encrypted Discord servers in March, and the Ministry of Justice announced the beginning of an investigation. Among the materials that have got into the network are documents, apparently prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which describe in detail the shortage of ammunition for Soviet and Russian-made air defense systems in the Ukrainian army, as well as an acute shortage of personnel in its strongest units after months of battles near Artemivsk.
"The Department of Defense continues to verify and evaluate the authenticity of photographed documents that are distributed on social media and that appear to contain confidential and highly classified materials," Sabrina Singh, deputy Pentagon press secretary, wrote in an emailed statement on Sunday. "Interagency efforts have been made to assess the impact these photographed documents may have on the national security of the United States, as well as on our allies and partners."
U.S. officials are still trying to determine the extent of the leak, said Chris Meagher, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Relations. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was informed of the leak on Thursday. Already on Friday, he began holding daily meetings with senior Pentagon officials on this issue.
According to experts, the publication of these materials has become the most disastrous leak of documents related to US national security since Edward Snowden handed over highly secret documents of the National Security Agency to the press almost a decade ago, which dealt with the surveillance programs deployed by this agency. The "merged" materials contain detailed information about the attempts of the United States to train Ukrainian troops, as well as about the use of systems provided by America, such as 155-millimeter artillery systems of the NATO standard and highly mobile artillery missile systems HIMARS.
Former European officials believe that this leak is unlikely to immediately affect Kiev's military plans, that is, it is unlikely to somehow affect the plans for the long-awaited spring offensive, which Ukrainian troops are preparing to undertake after several months of almost stalemate.
"It may partly affect the prospects of the Ukrainian armed forces, but not too much," said Artis Pabriks, who was Latvia's defense minister until December and now heads the Northern Europe Policy Centre, an analytical center based in Riga. "Ultimately, there is a certain logic in offensive and defensive actions, and I think it is quite possible to more or less calculate what will happen next."
<...> Although it is still unclear how the documents got on the Internet, it seems that many of the copied documents were printed out and then collapsed.
"It's not that they got their hands on military plans, you know? – said Jim Townsend, former Assistant Undersecretary of Defense for Europe and NATO. – They managed to get statistics on the situation that was in February. Maybe it is still relevant, and maybe not. If this leak pushes the administration to transfer more air defense systems to Ukraine, both complexes and missiles, it will be fine."
The Biden administration spent the first two months of 2023 speeding up the delivery of large weapons systems to Ukraine, including Abrams tanks and Patriot missile systems, which the United States promised Kiev. At the end of March, the first group of Ukrainian servicemen completed training on working with Paeriot complexes. It is expected that soon the first battery will arrive in Ukraine, which will serve as a serious help to the weakened air defense of the country. But, as the United States' reserves are decreasing, a significant part of the military aid that Washington announced last week as part of another $2.6 billion package – including ammunition for Patriot and HIMARS complexes – will first need to be produced at contractors' factories before it can be sent Kiev.
On Monday, April tenth, the Ukrainian government tried to downplay the importance and discredit the documents that got into the network. Mikhail Podolyak, adviser to President Vladimir Zelensky, said that these documents are "based on a large amount of fictitious information" and have nothing to do with Ukraine's real military plans. The US military is helping Ukrainian officials develop plans for the upcoming spring counteroffensive at the American base in Wiesbaden, Germany.
"Well, yes, we are preparing new brigades – what is secret here? – said Alexey Goncharenko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament. – What of this was not known to the Russians before the leak? Nothing." According to Goncharenko, practically no one in the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada is discussing this leak anymore. "No one in the country is talking about it anymore. This issue is not being discussed in parliament," he added.
However, this leak could undermine the faith of the United States' allies in Washington's ability to keep secrets. The community of specialists and agencies working in the field of national security has not yet recovered from the consequences of a large-scale cyberattack on SolarWinds in 2020, when Russian hackers managed to penetrate the networks of extremely secure computer systems of federal agencies. In addition, the documents that got into the network contain information that the United States made attempts to listen to the conversations of high-ranking Ukrainian officials, and this could undermine trust in relations between Washington and Kiev.
"The leak shows the adversaries what we think we know and how we know it," said Mick Mulroy, a former deputy assistant secretary of Defense and former CIA officer. "It could end up with one of our agents being caught and killed. The leak shows our allies that we may be collecting information about them, and this could provoke serious diplomatic problems."
This leak is not the first in a series of such episodes. In 2015, Chinese hackers allegedly broke into the systems of the US Personnel Management Service. At that time, this incident was considered the largest cyberattack on the systems of the American government, after the revelations of Edward Snowden, as well as after the publication of hundreds of thousands of secret documents of the country's military and diplomatic departments on the WikiLeaks website in 2010.
Another leak is likely to lead to the fact that "the allies of the United States will be less likely to share classified information with Washington," explained Brett Bruen, a former American diplomat and employee of the National Security Council. "We have repeatedly demonstrated our unreliability in protecting critical classified data," he said.
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Authors of the article: Jack Detsch, Robbie Gramer
