Recently leaked documents from the Pentagon include a rumour that Russian President Vladimir Putin is undergoing chemotherapy.
The papers, labelled as “Top Secret”, also indicate that Russian Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov and Russian National Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev “devised” a plan to “sabotage” Mr Putin while he undergoes medical treatment.
“Russia planned to divert resources from Taganrog, Russia to Mariupol, Ukraine and focus its attention on the southern front,” the document says. “According to [redacted] source, the plan for “the offensive” (no further information) was suspected to be a strategy devised by [Mr Gerasimov and Mr Patrushev] to sabotage Putin.”
The papers do not specify what alleged medical condition Mr Putin has that requires chemotherapy but there have been longstanding rumours that the Russian president has cancer.
The source’s name is redacted in the report and claims they received their information from an unidentified Russian source who has access to Kremlin officials.
The rumour in the document has not been confirmed.
At the top of the documents are abbreviations indicating the information is top secret and only viewable to people with top-secret security clearance in the US or other Five Eyes countries, according to Vice.
Five Eyes is an intelligence alliance between the US, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
The document is part of a greater leak that was released last week on social media platforms like Discord, Telegram, and Twitter.
The leak first occurred on Discord where an individual posted pages of top-secret documents that contained information about the Ukraine-Russia conflict as well as other countries like South Korea and China.
It is unclear where the documents originated from, though federal investigators arrested a 21-year-old air national guardsman on Thursday morning.
The leak was posted to a Discord group of “mostly young men and teenagers” who speak about their “shared loved of guns, racist online memes, and video games,” according to The New York Times.
Classified document leaks have occurred on Discord before but this most recent leak is more alarming for US officials because some of the documents were less than 50 days old.
