October 27, 2016
The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab broke down initial findings of the leak, assessing the messages as authentic. The emails show that Surkov received documents from a high-level separatist official located in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, including a list of casualties and expense reports for a government office located in Donetsk. He received “corrections” to a document that was later published by purported “public representatives of the Donbass” calling for an end to the Ukrainian “anti-terrorist operation.”