Previously Undisclosed Classified Documents Keep Leaking Out
April 21, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—The arrest, last week, of Massachusetts Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira as the suspected “documents leaker” has not stopped coverage of previously undisclosed leaked documents, particularly at the Washington Post, which seems to be running one to two stories per day on them. The leakage was almost certainly an issue behind the closed doors of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting at the U.S.’s Ramstein Air Base in Germany, today. “As I have discussed this issue with our allies and partners, I’ve been struck by their solidarity and their commitment to reject efforts to divide us, so nothing will fracture our unity or reduce our determination,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said at a press conference after the meeting.
One such document, apparently first covered by the French-language website Zone Militaire, provides details about U.S. and NATO aerial intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) activity in the Black Sea region between September 2022 and February 2023, the War Zone website reported yesterday. It includes data on flights of RQ-170 stealth drones, RQ-4 Global Hawk and RQ-9 reconnaissance drones, as well as activities involving British RC-135W Rivet Joints, French Mirage 2000s, and NATO Global Hawks. France’s use of Mirage 2000 fighter jets in the region in the ISR role, which they are capable of performing by carrying external reconnaissance pods, does not appear to have been revealed before now, either, says the War Zone.
According to the Washington Post, another document reports that Kiev largely ignored U.S. warnings that Ukrainian forces would not be able to hold Bakhmut. An assessment marked “top secret” cautioned that “steady” Russian advances since November “had jeopardized Ukraine’s ability to hold the city,” and Ukrainian forces would probably be “at risk of encirclement, unless they withdraw within the next month.”
But the Kiev regime’s planning is not limited to the Donbass region. According to another article in the Post yesterday, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency developed plans to conduct covert attacks on Russian forces in Syria, using secret Kurdish help. Zelenskyy directed a halt to the planning in December, but the leaked document, based on intelligence gathered as of Jan. 23, lays out in detail how the planning progressed, and how such a campaign could proceed if Ukraine revived it, the Post says. The document details how officers of the Main Directorate of Intelligence, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s military intelligence service, could plan deniable attacks that would avoid implicating the Ukrainian government itself.
The Post indicates that Ukrainian military planners considered only small-scale strikes and also training operatives of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the U.S. proxy force in eastern Syria, but the Kurds demanded weapons and secrecy about their role in the attacks, and balked at direct attacks on Russian forces in the Kurdish areas, the document says. “The documents that you are talking about regarding our forces are not real; our forces have never been a side in the Russian-Ukrainian War,” said Farhad Shami, an SDF spokesperson.
