The original documents are almost certainly real. Only question is why were they leaked and by who. It is not unlikely that the person they arrested is a patsy. Or maybe not. Who knows.
But the argument that it was done deliberately as some kind of 5D chess move doesn’t really hold water since some of the stuff in them is too damaging to the US and the idea that this sort of thing would be used to disseminate false information to trick the Russians is stupid anyway because Russia has a ton of other intelligence sources, they wouldn’t make or change plans based on one single information source, so the only ones fooled would be the general public observing the conflict.
Besides which, according to analysts who’ve looked into the documents they contain very little actionable information, most of it is very general and big picture stuff, and nothing really that wasn’t already known or suspected by OSINT. An actual disinformation operation would disseminate detailed and heretofore unknown but false info and would probably not do it via a random Discord server where the stuff would sit for a month before being noticed.
That’s not to say that the idea itself of leaks of genuine or mostly genuine documents being used to spread disinformation isn’t valid. The best way to disguise lies is to hide them among the truth. Which is why one thing that we need to be extremely wary of and that has apparently started to happen is that “additional documents” somehow turn up and get associated with the leak story but in reality they come from a completely different source and their veracity is much more questionable.
Various western mainstream media outlets (some like Bellingcat known to be very close to intelligence agencies) now seem to be engaged in exactly this sort of damage control/exploitation of the original leaks to disseminate actual false information and propaganda to paint a more rosy picture of the conflict for Ukraine than what the original leaks suggest, and to distract from the most damaging parts of the original leak.
The bottom line, as usual, is don’t believe anything that the western MSM tries to convince you of.
The original documents are almost certainly real. Only question is why were they leaked and by who. It is not unlikely that the person they arrested is a patsy. Or maybe not. Who knows.
But the argument that it was done deliberately as some kind of 5D chess move doesn’t really hold water since some of the stuff in them is too damaging to the US and the idea that this sort of thing would be used to disseminate false information to trick the Russians is stupid anyway because Russia has a ton of other intelligence sources, they wouldn’t make or change plans based on one single information source, so the only ones fooled would be the general public observing the conflict.
Besides which, according to analysts who’ve looked into the documents they contain very little actionable information, most of it is very general and big picture stuff, and nothing really that wasn’t already known or suspected by OSINT. An actual disinformation operation would disseminate detailed and heretofore unknown but false info and would probably not do it via a random Discord server where the stuff would sit for a month before being noticed.
That’s not to say that the idea itself of leaks of genuine or mostly genuine documents being used to spread disinformation isn’t valid. The best way to disguise lies is to hide them among the truth. Which is why one thing that we need to be extremely wary of and that has apparently started to happen is that “additional documents” somehow turn up and get associated with the leak story but in reality they come from a completely different source and their veracity is much more questionable.
Various western mainstream media outlets (some like Bellingcat known to be very close to intelligence agencies) now seem to be engaged in exactly this sort of damage control/exploitation of the original leaks to disseminate actual false information and propaganda to paint a more rosy picture of the conflict for Ukraine than what the original leaks suggest, and to distract from the most damaging parts of the original leak.
The bottom line, as usual, is don’t believe anything that the western MSM tries to convince you of.