Blinken rejected talks between Kiev and Moscow

The US has been reluctant to disclose alleged secret plans to support Ukraine. “We are aware of the reports on social media posts and the Ministry of Defense is reviewing the matter,” ministry spokesperson Sabrina Singh said on Friday. The US documents, circulating on Twitter and Telegram, are dated March 1 and are classified as “secret” or “top secret”. If they were real and leaked to the public, it would be a very unusual event.

One document says 16,000 to 17,500 Russian soldiers have been killed since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Those close to the U.S. government, however, believe the U.S. toll is actually much higher—about 200,000 Russians are thought to have been killed and wounded.

The New York Times reported Thursday that the US Department of Defense is investigating how documents about plans to support Ukrainian forces ended up on websites ahead of an expected counterattack against Russia.

A spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence service in Kyiv said the details in the posts could have been fabricated and there was no leak. A preliminary analysis indicated that there were inaccurate and distorted casualty figures and that some of the information came from apparently accessible sources.

A statement from Ukraine’s presidential office said on Friday that President Volodymyr Zelensky and high-level representatives of security officials discussed ways to prevent the disclosure of secret military information. Mykhailo Podoliak, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, said the reports sounded like Russian disinformation, raising suspicions about a counterattack.