Breach

Some works on the Leak, which certainly had an awfully weird journey into the light. Shashank Joshi on some of the overall themes:

Several slides provide an eye-wateringly detailed accounting of Western plans to arm and train Ukraine’s army, including the status of each Ukrainian brigade, its inventory of armour and artillery and the precise number of shells and precision-guided rockets Ukraine is firing each day. If accurate, the data could allow Russian military intelligence to identify the specific brigades that have probably been tasked with breaching Russian defences at the outset of the offensive. That, in turn, could allow Russia to carefully monitor those units to assess the location of an offensive. One slide indicates that Ukraine’s 10th Corps is likely to command the operation, which will now make its headquarters an obvious Russian target.

Perhaps the most damaging documents lay out the state of Ukrainian air defences. These are in dire shape, after parrying repeated Russian drone and missile strikes. The country’s Buk missiles were reckoned to be likely to run out on March 31st based on prevailing rates of fire, though it is not clear whether this has actually occurred. Its S-300 missiles will last only until around May 2nd. Together the two types make up around 90% of Ukraine’s medium-range air defences. The remaining batteries, including Western air-defence systems, “are unable to match the Russian volume” of fire, says the Pentagon, though on April 4th it announced it would send more interceptor missiles. Ukraine’s ability to protect its front lines “will be completely reduced” by May 23rd, it concludes. A table sets out the date at which each type of missile will be exhausted; a map depicts the location of every battery.

On the widely expected Ukrainian spring counter-offensive:

The document forecasting only modest success in Ukraine’s forthcoming counteroffensive indicates that Kyiv’s strategy revolves around reclaiming contested areas in the east while pushing south in a bid to sever Russia’s land bridge to Crimea, the peninsula Moscow illegally annexed in 2014 and now uses as a supply route for its forces inside Ukraine. The potency of entrenched Russian defenses coupled with “enduring Ukrainian deficiencies in training and munitions supplies probably will strain progress and exacerbate casualties during the offensive,” the document says.

The GRU is as leaky as… well, as a Russian aircraft carrier:

A single page in the leaked trove reveals that the U.S. intelligence community knew the Russian Ministry of Defense had transmitted plans to strike Ukrainian troop positions in two locations on a certain date in February and that Russian military planners were preparing strikes on a dozen energy facilities and an equal number of bridges in Ukraine.

The documents reveal that U.S. intelligence agencies are also aware of internal planning by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. One document describes the GRU planning a propaganda campaign in African countries with the goal of turning public support against leaders who support assistance to Ukraine and discrediting the United States and France, in particular. The Russian campaign, the report states, would try to plant stories in African media, including ones that tried to discredit Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

There’s a lot here and while I guess it may be some time before we have a good sense of the source of the Leakage, I don’t doubt that someone is going to find their way to prison. There’s also a fair amount of stuff that seems a bit more sketchy (we don’t have a strong sense of the quality of all of the documents), but much of the main stuff looks legit. The description of the course of the war is of course sobering but I wouldn’t say it’s transformative of my own thinking on Ukrainian prospects. See also the Lawfare podcast if you prefer much the same thing in audio form…