Racial slurs and racist memes were shared widely.”Īlthough the scale and sensitivity of the leaks are significant, this is not the first time that an intelligence breach has been traced back to an argument about video games. “This server was not especially geopolitical in nature, although its users had a staunchly conservative stance on several issues, members told Bellingcat. “Posts and channel listings show that the server’s users were interested in video games, music, Orthodox Christianity, and fandom for the popular YouTuber ‘Oxide’,” Toler said, referencing the military-themed YouTube channel. However, even that did not appear to be the original source: a third Discord server, named “Thug Shaker Central”, among other titles, may have been where the documents were originally posted as early as mid-January. That user had, in turn, found them on another Discord server, run by and for fans of the Filipino YouTuber WowMao, where 30 documents had been posted three days earlier, with “dozens” of other unverified documents about Ukraine. “After a brief spat with another person on the server about Minecraft Maps and the war in Ukraine, one of the Discord users replied: ‘Here, have some leaked documents’ – attaching 10 documents about Ukraine, some of which bore the ‘top secret’ markings,” said Aric Toler, an analyst at the investigative research group§ Bellingcat. In one server, called “Minecraft Earth Map”, 10 of the documents were posted as early as 4 March, a month before they appeared on 4chan. Before they emerged on to the public internet, the documents had been shared on closed chatrooms hosted by Discord, a gamer-focused chat app. Neither was the original source, however. One, with the correct figures, stemmed from a leak to 4chan, the chaotic image board best known for birthing the “alt right” movement.Īt the same time, a second set of documents, including the edited image, were being passed around pro-Russian Telegram channels. Two versions of those documents, one of which had been crudely digitally altered to understate Russian casualties and overstate Ukrainian ones, were passed around among observers of the war. The existence of the leaked cache was exposed as documents showing estimated casualties in the Bakhmut theatre of battle began circulating on public social networks last week.
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