US President Joe Biden said on Thursday he was “concerned” about the leak of classified US documents but appeared to rule out any immediate risks.
“I’m concerned that it happened, but there’s nothing contemporaneous that I’m aware of that is of great consequence right now,” Biden told reporters shortly after meeting Irish President Michael Higgins in Dublin.
“There’s a full-blown investigation going on,” he added, suggesting it was near completion. “They’re getting close.”
The US Department of Justice launched a criminal investigation after the photographs of documents, which appear to indicate information gathered by the US and its close allies, were leaked.
The Pentagon called the disclosure a “very serious risk” to US national security.
The authenticity of the images, which are circulating on various websites, has not yet been publicly confirmed by the authorities, nor could it be independently verified by Euronews.
According to Bellingcat, the images were leaked in early March on the Discord messaging platform, which is often used by video game players to chat and exchange gaming tips.
The documents, said by some to be the most serious security leak since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, are thought to have been leaked in two chatrooms.
One belongs to a user named wow_mao, later identified as an anonymous 20-year-old British YouTuber known for sharing memes on his profiles.
The other leak is believed to have appeared on a Discord chat discussing the Minecraft computer game.
Later they were picked up by Russian Telegram channels, which is when news of the leaks became widely known last week. The documents that were shared in Russian-language chatrooms are now believed to have been doctored to depict a smaller casualty count for Moscow forces.
The Washington Post claims the leak came from a young man who worked on a military base and shared the images in the online groups.
Using the pseudonym “OG”, he regularly posted hundreds of pages of documents from the military base where he worked over a period of several months, the newspaper said, adding that the person interviewed refused to specify which base it was.
There are strong indications that the leaker is a US citizen.
Over 300 respective documents are thought to be in circulation, with some revealing US intelligence concerns about the viability of a Ukrainian counter-offensive against Russian forces, and others indicating a high level of infighting within the Kremlin leadership over how to proceed in the coming months.
