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In leaked American intelligence documents, the situation in Ukraine appears dire.
Missiles for Soviet-era air defense are predicted to run out by May. The position in the main city of Bakhmut is a “disaster”. The military had suffered more than 120,000 killed and wounded – less than the total number of Russians, but huge for a country with less than a third of Russia’s population.
But in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, this past week, there was no palpable alarm at the number of pages of secret documents that emerged in one of the most extraordinary disclosures of American secrets in the past decade. In fact, some welcomed the leak, hoping it would confirm what President Volodymyr Zelensky has been saying for months — that Ukraine needs more ammunition and weapons to drive out Russian forces.
“From many points of view, this leak is very useful, and good, although I can say it is good for Ukraine,” said Oleksiy Honcharenko, a member of Parliament in the European Solidarity opposition party.
He said that if Western supporters of Ukraine rush to provide more than what they call “incremental” support, then “everything could go to waste, because so much is at stake now.”
Pentagon intelligence updates and brief slides that have become public this month — after being posted on the game’s chat server by a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman, authorities say — have shed new light on the state of the war. But they have not changed the overall picture, according to Western analysts and policymakers.
He said the new material is largely in line with what he already knows about the war — and won’t interfere with the way he handles it.
“This does not change our stance,” said Nils Schmid, foreign policy spokesman in the German Social Democratic Parliament, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s party in the country’s three-way coalition. “We know now is the time to supply weaponry to Ukraine.”
But as Ukraine prepares for an anticipated counterattack that could trigger a new phase of the nearly 14-month war, the document focuses attention on Ukraine’s challenges, the lack of Western military aid and the uncertainty of what lies ahead.
Whether Ukraine’s Western allies will be able to deliver what Kyiv needs at this crucial moment is an open question. European officials say they are working to speed up artillery shells to Ukraine, but admit they may not meet their goal of delivering one million rounds this year.
“We cannot produce more, at least not quickly,” said Ulrich Speck, a German foreign policy analyst. “Going forward, what can Europe still provide? It’s more difficult now, our awareness is that we don’t have the ability to get things quickly.
Some analysts note that intelligence does not determine how the war will unfold. Ukraine’s allies have greatly underestimated its capabilities in the past, predicting that Russian forces would overwhelm Kyiv in the opening days of the war. In addition, the document measures the situation more than six weeks ago. The reality of the battlefield is changing fast.
But the leaked documents clearly show how dependent the war effort is on the United States. American intelligence agents have penetrated the Russian military enough to give Ukraine real-time warnings about the timing of Moscow’s airstrikes, and even specific targets. Some leaked slides show satellite imagery after Ukraine’s airstrikes of “US-produced” targets in Russian-held territory – fresh evidence that the United States provided precise targeting data.
One of the West’s biggest concerns about the leaks is that Russia will struggle to find and shut down American intelligence sources. But in the week since the classified documents were sent widely on Telegram and Twitter, fears that have not materialized, two senior US officials said: There is no indication that the Kremlin has taken steps to block the United States from penetrating Russian security and intelligence. service.
There is also no sign that Russian commanders have changed operations on the ground in Ukraine in response to the disclosures, the two U.S. officials said.
In addition, Ukrainian officials, while expressing their displeasure with the leak, told American officials that the disclosure would not lead to a planned attack because Russia already knew the parameters of Ukrainian vulnerability (such as the lack of weapons and ammunition). And the document does not say exactly when, where and how the Ukrainians will launch a counteroffensive, a senior US official said.
“It’s hard for me to believe that this will dramatically change Ukraine’s short-term plans for its counteroffensive,” said Samuel Charap, a Russian analyst at the RAND Corporation. “There is a discussion in the open source about the direction that is in the south. Does it affect the time, maybe.
While the documents show that American spy agents have intercepted Russian military communications, sometimes down to the details of planned Russian attacks, they give little indication that the United States has been able to listen in on Russian leaders’ conversations.
In documents seen by The New York Times — which include many but not all of the hundreds of pages posted online — information about President Vladimir V. Putin and his inner circle appears to be mainly hearsay. An entry describing a sensational plot by senior Russian officials to sabotage the invasion was attributed to a Ukrainian lawmaker “who received information from an unknown Russian source with access to Kremlin officials.”
The lack of direct information about Mr. Putin may reflect the challenges the American intelligence community faces in gathering information about a leader who has shrouded himself in a cocoon of extraordinary secrecy. However, the documents provide only a small window into the breadth of America’s intelligence collection, based on information obtained from electronic intercepts rather than on the CIA’s network of human sources, which the agency carefully guards.
In Russia, many supporters of the war have warned that the leak could be part of a ruse. New details about the headwinds facing Ukraine’s military efforts – including predictions that its stockpile of air defense missiles will be completely depleted by early May – have been so extensive that some pro-Kremlin commentators have dismissed it as Western disinformation intended to get Russia to let it go. his guard dismounted.
“We would be happy if this is true,” Russian state television talk-show host Olga Skabeyeva quipped about the leak last Tuesday.
But the document also outlines Russia’s growing military challenges and devastating losses, providing a behind-the-scenes look at why Western officials believe the war will drag on into the next year. Russia’s slow-moving offensive in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine is “likely to become a stalemate,” predicted a February 22 briefing slide, with high Russian combat losses and dwindling ammunition stocks “resulting in an ongoing war beyond 2023.”
For some, that serves as a reminder that wars are more likely to end in some kind of negotiated settlement than in a decisive military victory for either side.
“We know that Ukraine must tilt the military balance in favor to open the way for negotiations,” Mr. Schmid, a member of the German parliament, said.
For a cadre of analysts around the world deciphering social media videos and commercial satellite imagery to gather information about the war, intelligence leaks have provided new data points. But some say they have seen nothing that has caused them to change their fundamental views on the war, which also points to an ongoing conflict.
One Russian military analyst, Ruslan Leviev, said the document was consistent with previous conclusions, including his view that Ukraine’s challenges in mobilizing soldiers and acquiring ammunition meant that the upcoming counterattack would not deliver a decisive victory. Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Institute for Foreign Policy Research, said he didn’t see anything that “changed my mind too much.”
But he warned that the outcome of Ukraine’s counteroffensive — and the war — depends on factors that American intelligence agencies are not even aware of, such as the morale of troops on both sides and how they behave.
“There’s a lot about this war that we still don’t know, or we can’t be sure of,” Mr Lee said. “This is war, and you can’t have perfect information.”
This reporting was contributed by Helen Cooper, Julian E. Barnes, Alina Lobzina, Steven Erlanger, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Christopher F. Schuetze and Catherine Porter.
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