KYIV (Reuters) -Ukraine’s defence minister said on Wednesday the alleged Pentagon document leaks contain a mixture of true and false information about his country’s military, but he downplayed its negative impact.
“There is a lot of information there which does not correspond with reality,” Oleksii Reznikov said during a briefing in Madrid with his Spanish counterpart.
“The information which does correspond with reality has lost its relevance. So it’s a mix of truth and falsehoods.”
Reznikov also said he believed the leaks were a deliberate attempt to sow discord among Kyiv’s allies.
“The benefactor of this work is of course Russia and its allies or disciples,” he said.
“The goal of this work is to lower the level of trust among (our) partners, especially the United States and other countries, and to me this is completely obvious and clear.”
U.S. officials are trying to find who leaked the classified data as Ukrainian forces prepare for an expected counteroffensive to retake Russian-occupied territory.
Reznikov also dismissed as “not true” suggestions in the Pentagon leaks that NATO special forces were operating inside Ukraine.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Wednesday the trove of documents might be fake and a deliberate attempt to mislead Moscow. The Kremlin said it did not know “like everyone else” how authentic the documents were.
Some national security experts and U.S. officials say they suspect that the leaker could be American, but do not rule out pro-Russian actors.
(Reporting by Dan Peleschuk; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Angus MacSwan)
