BBC News:
What to make of the dozens of classified American Defence Department documents – maps, charts and photographs – now circulating on the internet?
Complete with timelines and dozens of impenetrable military acronyms, the documents, some of them marked “top secret”, paint a detailed picture of the war in Ukraine.
They tell of the casualties suffered on both sides, the military vulnerabilities of each and, crucially, what their relative strengths are likely to be when Ukraine decides to launch its much-anticipated spring offensive.
How real are these printed pages, unfolded and photographed, possibly on someone’s dining room table? And what do they tell us, or the Kremlin, that we did not already know?
First things first: this is the biggest leak of secret American information on the war in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion 14 months ago. Some of the documents are as much as six weeks old, but the implications are huge.
Pentagon officials are quoted as saying the documents are real.
Information on at least one of them appears to have been crudely altered in a later version, but out of a dump of as many as 100 documents, that seems a relatively minor detail.
The BBC has seen more than 20 of the documents. They include detailed accounts of the training and equipment being provided to Ukraine as it puts together a dozen new brigades for an offensive that could begin within weeks.
It says when the brigades will be ready and lists all the tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery pieces that are being provided by Ukraine’s western allies.
But it notes that “equipment delivery times will impact training and readiness”.
One map includes a “mud-frozen ground timeline”, assessing ground conditions across eastern Ukraine as spring progresses.
After a winter that has tested Ukraine’s air defences to the limit, there’s also a sobering analysis of Kyiv’s diminishing air defence capability, as it seeks to balance its limited resources to protect civilians, critical infrastructure and its frontline troops.
