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“We were blindsided and furious,” said a U.S. official who fielded dozens of media inquiries about the leaks. The official, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the disclosure of classified documents.
At the time, neither the Pentagon, the White House nor the 18 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community had any sense of the scope of the classified material exposed. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin immediately established a Defense Department task force, part of an urgent effort across the government to identify and mitigate the damage.
“The first job was to just get our arms around what was out there … what information may have been compromised,” a senior defense official said. “Particularly before the investigation had really identified any suspects, it was trying to quickly understand and make some sense of the information.”
Government spokespeople solicited information from media organizations about what they were planning to publish, and scrambled to track down specific intelligence documents from their classified systems, even as law enforcement agencies were trying to piece together who was responsible for the breach.
A chief concern was that some of the material suggested, indirectly or directly, the wide array of means by which U.S. intelligence agencies acquire information, including satellite surveillance, eavesdropping and human sources. Another worry was that the leaks exposed information that had been shared with the United States by partner countries, potentially jeopardizing intelligence-sharing relationships.
“They were somewhere in the web, and where exactly, and who had access at the point, we don’t know. We simply don’t know,” Austin said at a news conference in early April.
Eight months later, the scope of the impact has become clearer, according to interviews with U.S. officials and a review of hundreds of documents: Top-secret intelligence assessments that emerged in the leaks predicted Ukraine’s failure to make substantial gains in its counteroffensive — a multibillion-dollar effort that cost tens of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives. The bleak forecast provided a sharp contrast to Washington’s optimistic messaging on the war, and it hurt Ukraine’s relationship with its chief backer, the U.S. government.
The impact of the leaks was particularly pronounced in Kyiv, where the fallout from the revelations was immediate and illustrated the seriousness of national secrets spilling out on a gaming platform frequented by teens.
The leaks included never-before-released casualty estimates for Ukrainian forces, weaknesses in Ukraine’s ability to service damaged armored vehicles and the country’s shrinking supply of air defense munitions, which left population centers vulnerable to Russian cruise missile strikes and drones. Other documents warned that Ukraine was struggling to sustain troops, artillery and equipment, which probably would result in only “modest territorial gains” that fall “well short” of Kyiv’s goals.
Officials reached out to partners and allies, hoping to ease concerns.
Austin spoke with his Ukrainian counterpart, Oleksii Reznikov, after the classified assessments began spilling out into public view. Gen. Mark A. Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s top military officer, to apologize.
Zaluzhny assured him that the leak would be useful to Ukraine, a senior Ukrainian official said. “How so?” Milley asked. “It doesn’t say we have F-16s there, so send us some of those ASAP,” Zaluzhny said.
Milley laughed, the senior Ukrainian official said. Kyiv had been pushing unsuccessfully for months for the Biden administration to allow European nations to donate U.S.-made fighter jets to Ukraine — perhaps a leak showing the dire straits of Ukraine’s defenses amid waves of Russian missiles and artillery fire would help.
Ukraine’s president, however, was less inclined to see the breach of classified information as a laughing matter. “Anything that informs our enemy in advance in one way or another is definitely a minus for us,” President Volodymyr Zelensky fumed in the aftermath of the leaks. “I don’t see any advantages here.”
The Ukrainian leader told The Washington Post in May that the net effect of the leaks was a better-informed Russia and a lesser-regarded United States. “It is not beneficial to the reputation of the White House, and I believe it is not beneficial to the reputation of the United States,” Zelensky said.
In early 2023, the public mood in Washington about the war in Ukraine was broadly optimistic. The U.S. military and NATO allies had been training thousands of Ukrainian soldiers in Germany and racing to supply Kyiv with tens of billions of dollars’ worth of new tanks, other armored vehicles and weaponry.
“The spirit of the Ukrainians remains unbroken; if anything, it’s stronger than ever,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in February.
Many armchair generals predicted major military successes for Kyiv in the coming year.
“Ukraine is going to liberate Crimea by the end of August,” retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the former commander of U.S. Army Europe, declared in January. “There are no bright lights on the horizon for the Kremlin.”
But the leak of classified U.S. intelligence documents — allegedly by Massachusetts Air National Guard member Jack Teixeira — in the early spring pierced those rosy assessments and revealed that, secretly, the United States harbored profound concerns about Ukraine’s prospects for success.
The documents warned of the “catastrophic situation” facing Ukrainian troops in the fight to retain the eastern city of Bakhmut. Another brief prepared by the Defense Department’s Joint Staff noted that Ukraine’s “ability to provide medium range air defense to protect the [front lines] will be completely reduced by May 23. UKR assessed to withstand 2-3 more wave strikes” from Russian missiles and drones.
Other forward-looking assessments noted that “Russia’s grinding campaign of attrition in the Donbas region is likely heading toward a stalemate.” The result would be “a protracted war beyond 2023.”
“The leaks showed that the U.S. public messaging on the war was at best half the story,” said Michael Kofman, a defense analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The troubling assessments detailed in the leaks increased pressure on the administration from Capitol Hill, where a small but growing segment of House Republicans was questioning whether the tens of billions of dollars in U.S. assistance to Ukraine was paying off or evaporating in a stalemated war of attrition. That grouping of right-wing Republicans has now turned into a powerful bloc that has held up President Biden’s $106 billion supplemental funding request including Ukraine aid. “The Ukraine scam is up,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) recently announced on social media, citing a lack of recent battlefield gains.
Rather than exposing willful deceit by a U.S. government eager to bury bad news, the Discord leaks revealed a sharp divide between the U.S. intelligence analysts who authored the documents and many senior officials at the White House, Pentagon and State Department who were overly sanguine about Ukraine’s prospects for success.
“The Discord leaks exposed that institutional gap between policymakers, who are often excessively optimistic, and analysts — who are sometimes excessively pessimistic,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a Europe analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
The analysts ultimately proved accurate: Despite tens of billions of dollars in new weaponry and other equipment and months of training, Kyiv has been unable to retake large swaths of occupied territory and sever Russia’s land bridge to Crimea, Ukraine’s principal objective of the counteroffensive.
A counteroffensive delayed
Unlike previous national security leaks, the alleged disclosure of documents by Teixeira was unique in that it gave the public a glimpse of highly classified intelligence only weeks after the information was provided to senior military brass.
The historic leaks by military analyst Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in 2010 and intelligence contractor Edward Snowden in 2013 were stunning in their depth of insight into the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, and the long tentacles of the U.S. surveillance state. Each involved the disclosure of thousands of documents that exposed dense layers of government deceit and secrecy. But most of the classified files were years old by the time they were published.
By contrast, the number of documents that were shared on the Discord server numbered in the hundreds, but they disclosed classified military assessments prepared for Milley that were only a month or two old and still operationally sensitive.
U.S. officials sought to reassure Ukrainians that the advantage Russia might gain from the disclosures would be negligible. “A lot of work was done with Ukraine to reassure them this wasn’t going to affect the counteroffensive,” a second U.S. official said.
A former senior defense official noted that the United States in some cases had taken steps to mitigate vulnerabilities exposed in the leaks. In the case of the disclosure showing gaps in Ukraine’s air defense network, that included working with allied nations to supply Ukraine with additional antimissile capability.
“By the time that information was out, we had already gone in 110 percent to try to address that problem,” the former official said.
Despite the reassurances, the leaks played at least a small role in delaying the start of the counteroffensive, which had already been held up as Kyiv waited for more Western weapons, according to Olha Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration.
Ukrainian officials needed to “take some time to assess the situation” because of the “massive leak of data,” Stefanishyna said. “You cannot really take this risk [of starting the counterattack] until you have assessed everything and made your conclusions.”
The leak also raised doubts in Ukraine about Washington’s ability to keep sensitive secrets — a concern noted by Zelensky’s top advisers in September ahead of his trip to Washington to discuss war plans with Biden.
“Don’t share anything with Biden you don’t want on the front page of The Washington Post,” an adviser warned Zelensky during a pre-trip meeting, according to a person familiar with the conversation.
The former senior defense official said that while the leaks represented a strain, they did not sever the intelligence-sharing relationship with Kyiv. He noted that Moscow already had extensive knowledge about Ukraine’s military and government before the disclosures.
But for the public, at least, there was much that was surprising. The leaks depicted Zelensky in a new light, revealing his apparent interest in occupying Russian border villages and obtaining long-range missiles to hit targets deep inside Russian territory — an assertion that Ukrainians deny and would have deeply angered Washington.
When confronted with the Discord leaks’ gloomy predictions, many inside and outside the U.S. government either dismissed the intelligence assessments as wrong or insisted they were outdated.
“Where Ukraine might have been a month ago, two months ago, three months ago, is not where it is now in terms of its ability, for example, to prosecute a counteroffensive and to deal with the ongoing Russian aggression,” Blinken said in May, insisting Ukraine would make meaningful territorial gains and was achieving “tangible progress.”
Even in late August, amid mounting evidence that Russian defenses probably would stymie a Ukrainian breakthrough, influential military analysts in Washington insisted that major gains were still achievable.
“Ukraine’s offensive push is far from over. In fact, it is still in the early stages,” wrote David H. Petraeus, a retired U.S. Army general, and Frederick Kagan, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute think tank.
Ultimately, it would take an acknowledgment by Ukraine’s top general that the conflict had reached a stalemate for many Ukraine boosters in Washington to admit that the leaks had been prescient.
“There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough,” Zaluzhny told the Economist in November. “Just like in the First World War, we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate.”
At the moment, Ukrainian forces remain dozens of miles away from the southeastern city of Melitopol — a key rail and transit hub — and appear unlikely to reach even the town of Tokmak, a necessary stop on the way to severing Russia’s land bridge to Crimea.
Overlooking the intelligence
There were several reasons that senior figures in the U.S. government doubted the perspective of the intelligence analysts, U.S. officials said.
Their bleak forecasts had been attributed to analysts’ penchant to rigidly focus on what they could count or see from above — namely, troops, positions and equipment — as opposed to intangibles such as the will to fight and asymmetrical inventiveness.
Military planners at U.S. European Command held the view that the analyst community badly misjudged the strength of Ukraine’s military at the outset of the war and continued to overestimate how Russia’s military would perform on the battlefield. “At the beginning, they were just flat wrong,” said a senior administration official, referring to the U.S. intelligence community’s prediction of Kyiv’s swift collapse.
But the distant perch of the intelligence community ultimately allowed for a perspective that more accurately captured the immense challenges Ukraine’s military would face on the battlefield during this year’s counteroffensive. By contrast, the front-row seat afforded to U.S. military planners and camaraderie with counterparts in Kyiv created a sense of buy-in that resulted in a more optimistic outlook, officials said.
“This was natural: You’re prone to be optimistic about the mission you’re tasked with helping plan,” said a Pentagon adviser.
Crucially, U.S. officials also viewed the airing of pessimistic battle outcomes as detrimental to their endeavor to raise support for the war effort, both in Congress and internationally.
“That’s sort of coalition-building 101,” said Shapiro, the European Council on Foreign Relations analyst. “Nobody ever walked out into a NATO meeting and said, ‘Well, we’re definitely going to lose this war, I hope you guys will join us.”
In response to the leaks, the Air Force announced on Monday disciplinary actions against 15 personnel after an inspector general investigation found officers in Teixeira’s unit “failed to take proper action after becoming aware of his intelligence-seeking activities.”
In one instance, Teixeira was found viewing classified intelligence products and writing information on a Post-it note. He was confronted about it and directed to shred it, but “it was never verified what was written on the note or whether it was shredded,” according to the inspector general report.
Disciplinary action included the relieving of a commander, Col. Sean Riley; the permanent removal of previously suspended commanders; and the reassignment of the wing’s intelligence mission. As of Monday, it still had not resumed, raising the question of whether the removal is permanent.
Siobhan O’Grady and Isabelle Khurshudyan contributed to this report.
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