US reviewing whether Ukraine war documents were leaked

The Defense Department and the Justice Department are reviewing a handful of documents that were released on several social media sites and appear to detail U.S. and NATO aid to Ukraine, but may have been altered or used as part of a misinformation campaign.

The documents, which were posted on sites such as Twitter, are labeled secret and resemble routine updates that the U.S. military's Joint Staff would produce daily but not distribute publicly. They are dated ranging from Feb. 23 to March 1, and provide what appears to be details on the progress of weapons and equipment going into Ukraine with more precise timelines and amounts than the U.S. generally provides publicly.

They are not war plans and they provide no details on any planned Ukraine offensive. And some inaccuracies — including estimates of Russian troops deaths that are significantly lower than numbers publicly stated by U.S. officials — have led some to question the documents' authenticity.

"It is very important to remember that in recent decades, the Russian special services' most successful operations have been taking place in Photoshop," Andriy Yusov, a spokesman for Ukraine's military intelligence directorate, said on Ukrainian TV. "From a preliminary analysis of these materials, we see false, distorted figures on losses on both sides, with part of the information collected from open sources."

Separately, however, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's office released a statement Friday about a meeting he had with his senior military staff, and it noted that "the participants of the meeting focused on measures to prevent the leakage of information regarding the plans of the defense forces of Ukraine."

If the published documents are authentic to any degree,...