According to https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkadnb/pentagons-ukraine-war-plans-leaked-on-minecraft-discord-before-telegram-and-twitter. The files were first uploaded to a Discord server about Minecraft, then 4chan, on Cloudflare servers in San Francisco. In my view, these are the last places to upload data if someone wanted to avoid getting caught. Some of the images have "FISA" in the classification headers. As far as I know that means the "The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act" which is not about classifying documents at all.
Of course they are legitimate.
Consider the alternative: do you really think Russia created them as disinformation and came up with the idea of putting them on a Minecraft Discord server for them to leak out and look real?
That's completely implausible, the Russians aren't that clever. And they don't care that much about what random Westerners think about their actions (obviously).
Elites, yes, sure. I'm sure they would like the sanctions lifted, and such.
Who is PIF? Other than the foil of SpeedyInTexas for his 20 self-posts a day? Does he have some special knowledge to authenticate these that the rest of us are unaware of?
The whole "Ukraine is winning" narrative is absurd, and it's laughed at by much of the world. People in the USA, even Freepers who should know better after watching how the US media played with Hunter's Laptop and the Trump Russia Collusion hoax continue to believe the BS written in the Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today and created by nasty NeoCon outfits like the Institute for the Study of War.
All that stuff is preposterous, but many here buy it. Crazy. (I had someone post a Newsweek article to "disprove" something I said).
As the saying goes: "You can't fix stupid".
Cheers!
do you think the documents are legitimate?
—
I have no idea - I’d have to see the original documents in the Pentagon or Joint Chiefs - which isn’t happening.
Most of it is covered in the War Zone article I linked - but they are unlike the classified documents of my day; these are printed in terrible colors and then photoed in a crumbled state with no attempt to smooth or straighten them.
That’s all I can say other than, if they are real, the printing standards are somewhere below amateur and into grade school levels. Not what one would expect from today’s services, unless they are hiring grade schoolers to do document formatting and printing.
“do you think the (purportedly leaked Pentagon) documents are legitimate?”
I think it likely that they originated with the Government - either leaked, or as a misinformation operation.
In either event, they would have a lot of valid information (which would be required to make any misinformation credible).
My takeaways were that the Counteroffensive Operation is named “Phoenix Strike”, NATO accepted the task of equipping and training nine new Ukrainian Brigades, they should be nearly equipped now, but full training seemed behind schedule for an Operation this month (it might even take until June to rotate every Battalion through a month of unit training).
Maybe some Battalions will not have time for a full training rotation before the Operation launches, and will have to make due with a few embedded trainers, online training, and lower tier missions during the assault.
The ones the Gray Zone shows have obviously been altered. There are several areas photo-shopped. The worst one is the "ground vehicles" where it was changed from 6,004 to 6 00 and they left the space where the "," was. Ya ain't gotta be Buckhead to see that one. Also, ya gotta keep it reasonable to make it believable. The "7 fighter/bomber ; 8 rotary wing" claim went a bit too far, as there are 10X that many documented. Even the most loyal Russian troll wouldn't believe that one. It's not clear if any of the pics posted so far were un-manipulated, including the earliest versions posted a month ago, but the ones on Gray Zone certainly have been.