A major leak of top secret Pentagon documents that has shaken Washington and aired disputed claims British special forces are operating in Ukraine was shared on an obscure online meme group run by a 20-year-old university student living in the UK.
He said a moderator on his Discord chat group called the End of Wow Mao Zone ‘shared 30 plus leaked documents concerning the Russia-Ukraine war’ on March 1 and one month later he was unwittingly at the centre of the scandal.
In an interview with the New York Times, wow_mao said he spent ‘little time’ on the Discord server and mostly focused on his YouTube channel where he has about 250,000 subscribers.
It was just spread onto the nicheiest [sic], nerdiest parts of the internet,’ he said. ‘That’s the kind of people who would find these documents — losers. That’s who the U.S. government really has to fear.’
A lack of respect for the government was cited as why the documents were most likely leaked, wow_mao telling the outlet: ‘They’ll always find it funny to mock them and cut under them in some sort of way.’
The leak includes claims that 50 members of the UK’s special forces have operated in Ukraine, prompting the UK Ministry of Defence to warn against taking allegations contained in the documents ‘at face value’.
Britain has the largest contingent of special forces on Ukrainian soil, alongside more than a dozen operators each from fellow NATO states Latvia, France and the US, according to a document dated March 23.
In response, the Ministry of Defence posted on Twitter: ‘The widely reported leak of alleged classified US information has demonstrated a serious level of inaccuracy.’
