The trove of roughly 100 leaked U.S. classified documents, some marked “top secret,” is a sensational intelligence breach and, according to some sources, a highly damaging one. But more than the juicy tidbits contained in the material, much of which involves detailed information pertaining to the war in Ukraine, the most sensational, and damaging, aspect of the story might be the fact of the leak itself. And on that score — how and why the documents came to see the light of day — very little is known.
If most of the documents are genuine, as they appear to be — with apparent alterations intended to exaggerate Ukrainian casualty estimates and minimize Russian ones — then U.S. authorities will urgently need to trace the leak’s provenance. The Justice Department has launched an investigation intended to do just that. The Biden administration will also be faced with some damage control based on information that was contained on some leaked briefing slides suggesting Washington has been spying on its own allies, including South Korea and Ukraine itself.
Granted, the material may have provided the Kremlin with some useful details. But there is little in the document dump that is likely to be a game changer in the war itself. It might be somewhat helpful, for example, for the Russians to know the estimates of the amounts of arms and munitions in the hands of various Ukrainian army units, or to see that Pentagon analysts are worried that Ukrainian air defense systems have been thinned out in the course of shooting down Russian cruise missiles in recent months. But it is likely to be more valuable for Moscow to discover the range of U.S. intelligence capabilities that enabled the collection of such information, and to garner hints about how Washington gathered it in the first place. Critically, there was no disclosure in the leaks of information that might have forced Ukraine to fundamentally alter its plans — for instance, revelations on the timing and location of an anticipated spring offensive by Kyiv.
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Also on the Editorial Board’s agenda
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Prisoners are eating again in Bahrain after the government agreed to let them spend more hours outside and expanded their access to visitors, a welcome development ahead of the crown prince’s visit to Washington this week. Activists say the monthlong hunger strike will resume on Sept. 30 if these promises aren’t kept. Read our editorial calling for the compassionate release of Abdulhadi al-Khawaja, a political prisoner since 2011 who participated in the strike.
A retired teacher in Saudi Arabia, Muhammad al-Ghamdi, has been sentenced to death by the country’s Specialized Criminal Court solely based on his tweets, retweets and YouTube activity, according to Human Rights Watch. The court’s verdict, July 10, was based on two accounts on X, formerly Twitter, which had only a handful of followers. The posts criticized the royal family. The sentence is the latest example of dictatorships imposing harsh sentences on people who use social media for free expression, highlighted in our February editorial.
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The outlines of most of what is contained in the leaked material posted online are well known. Anyone with a passing interest in the war would already have been aware that Russian forces nearly encircled the Ukrainian mining city of Bakhmut in early March, but were driven back. The new information lends texture to the direness of that situation, perhaps more useful to future historians than current military planners.
While Russia will likely be interested in the leaked assessments showing the shortages facing Ukrainian air defenses, there is still much it will not know from the new information, including the rate at which Kyiv is taking delivery of new Western antiaircraft munitions. In fact, Russia clearly already was aware that Ukraine has been running low on air defense equipment, not to mention artillery ammunition, not least because Ukrainian leaders have long been publicly beseeching the West to accelerate deliveries of both. And if the fresh details of those shortages heartened Russian military planners, they are likely also worried that the information, though relatively recent, could be stale by now.
None of that should be construed to minimize the peril facing Ukraine, the size of whose population and military is a fraction that of Russia’s. Even as Kyiv’s forces have held fast in the face of Russia’s offensive in eastern Ukraine over the past two months, there is no secret about the West’s anxieties over its own ability, and its will, to continue resupplying Ukrainian troops in a war that looks likely to drag on for many more months or longer. In the Ukraine fight, Putin might plausibly regard his most potent weapon to be the conflict’s most open secret — that the longer the battles drag on, the more pressure will build on Ukraine’s allies to sue for peace, on any terms. No leaks are likely to change that calculus.
