MOSCOW, Apr 11 Major leak of US classified documents with details military assistance to Ukraine from the United States and NATO could begin in the chat of the social network Discord, popular among gamers, to attract attention, according to the American news agency Associated Press.
«As part of the debate about Ukraine, according to one of the chat participants, an unknown user shared documents that were supposedly classified, first reprinting them in his own words, and then, a few months ago, began posting images of documents,» the agency's material says.
The Associated Press interviewed a man who claims he was a member of the Discord chat group, which has had documents appearing for months. The man, who said he was 18, declined to give his name, citing concerns for his personal safety. The person who first posted the documents did not appear to be motivated by ideology or the goal of widely exposing state secrets, the source said, but rather sought to impress people in the chat.
The user declined to identify the person who originally uploaded the documents to the chat, or confirm whether the person worked for the US government. But he mentioned that the user had the nickname the O.G. At the same time, the agency said that it could not confirm all the information from the interlocutor, since the chat where the files were published had already been deleted.
Posts featuring classified documents appeared to go unnoticed outside the chat room until a few weeks ago when they became more widely shared on social media and made their way to major news outlets, the agency said.
Earlier, the media wrote that the Pentagon was investigating a leak on the social network of materials describing the state of Ukrainian troops and the plans of the United States and NATO to strengthen them. The New York Times noted that the documents, dated early March, are allegedly distributed in «Russian pro-government Telegram channels.» It was alleged that more than 100 documents could get on the Internet, the damage from what happened is estimated as significant. The Pentagon said they are investigating information about the leak. Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov, answering a question about the leak, said that the Russian Federation had no doubts that the United States and NATO were directly or indirectly involved in the conflict.
The White House refused to confirm the authenticity of the materials published on the network and said that it was not yet ready to voice a theory about how and why the leak was organized.