Aric Toler Profile picture
Apr 26 10 tweets 3 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
So, I think I figured out how these edited casualty counts came about.

The first public mention of them was through the pro-Russia Donbass Devushka Telegram channel. How did the channel get her?

A pro-Ukraine troll group on Telegram made them as a joke, and sent on to her.
Donbass Devushka posted the documents on April 5th at 1:29pm (US/Central) and shortly after.

In the Devushka group chat, you can see someone say they have leaked documents about half an hour before then. ImageImageImage
Below is a screenshot (redacted) of the original post and correspondence, originally captured by a person in this pro-Ukraine Telegram troll group (hence the +7 hour time zone difference from me). Lucas is apparently an admin from the Donbass Devushka group. Image
The person also claims they are the one who posted the documents on 4chan a few hours beforehand. Timezone below also US/Central. Image
They claim they gathered these documents from the Minecraft Discord server, where 10 documents were posted on March 4.

5 documents were posted by Donbass Devushka, 3 on 4chan. The common document is the one that was in its original form on 4chan, and edited on Donbass Devushka.
So all of this hubbub, including the incredibly stupid segment on Tucker Carlson's show (RIP), is from some shitposters in a pro-Ukraine Telegram group who were trolling Donbass Devushka.
Not only that, but the initial April 6th Pentagon investigation into the leaks is because Donbass Devushka posted them on her channel. If this shitposter group didn't send these documents to the channel, they may have gone unnoticed on just 4chan even longer, if not indefinitely.
With all this in mind, let's revisit this amazing article:
reuters.com/world/us/russi…
Also: this was not NAFO who did this. The group that sent Donbass Devushka the doctored image probably think that NAFO is incredibly cringe.
A lot of people with cartoon dog avis have very bad reading comprehension, so no, I wasn't calling NAFO cringe (though I'm reconsidering that now). I said that the original Telegram group that doctored the image would think that, as they're 4chan-esque shitposters.

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More from @AricToler

Apr 27
Government motion for pretrial detention of Jack Teixeira was just posted: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…
Why would he smash his Xbox? Image
Initial reporting on Teixeira noted that he intel drops started in October 2022. New report we had last week in the NYT shows he actually started posting right after the war started in February 2022. Image
Read 10 tweets
Apr 27
Since 2014, our YouTube channel has basically been a giant repository for us to dump videos that we embed into articles. Our new social media manager is cleaning it up and making it actually presentable, and maybe even worth following. There's some neat stuff in there!
If you've see the Navalny documentary, you have to watch the full, 49-minute (!!!!) call between Navalny and one of his poisoners, Konstantin Kudryavtsev. The movie only shows ~2min of the call.
We recently did a very neat tutorial on using NASA FIRMS in OSINT work -- this is a resource that shows heat-generating events, such as major structure fires, forest fires, and so on.
Read 4 tweets
Apr 21
We found posts on a public Discord server from Jack Teixeira going back to February 25, 2022 - the day after Russia's full invasion of Ukraine - with information from classified intelligence reports.
nytimes.com/2023/04/21/us/…
Everyone had a good sense of humor about it. Unknowing is Jack's Discord handle. Image
Image
Read 6 tweets
Apr 20
ImageImage
That's right ImageImage
Wish I had thought to call him LeBlue in the original tweet
Read 17 tweets
Apr 13
My first byline with the NYT, detailing some of the new Discord/Pentagon leaks.

nytimes.com/2023/04/13/wor…
(Freelance, Bellingcat can't get rid of me that easily)
And my second byline, which is a slightly bigger deal than the first: nytimes.com/2023/04/13/wor…
Read 5 tweets
Apr 7
(Also, everyone adding their watermarks to public Discord screenshots is a chump)
This isn't the original-original source. The guy who posted them on this Minecraft server got them from some other Discord server (I don't know which one)
Read 15 tweets

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