Wikileaks: Diplomatic disaster zone

Wikileaks is planning to make available up to 400,000 sensitive documents from the past five years that include talks with politicians, government officials and journalists, as well as evaluations by US diplomats about their host countries.

Relations with Russia, and President Putin, below, could be adversely affected, senior diplomats warned last night.

James F Collins, who served as ambassador to Moscow from 1997 to 2001, said: "Leaking information of this kind will be detrimental to building the trust among officials necessary to conduct effective and productive diplomacy. It will impede doing things in a normal, civilized way

"I would think the information they will leak is likely to contain analysis, records of discussions or reporting on confidential conversations between officials or official policy recommendations or suggestions about policy or diplomatic actions."

Relations between the US and Afghanistan's President Karzai are sure to be tested, with revelations from Washington telegrams to Kabul expected to reveal details of Afghan informers.

Relations with Turkey could also be damaged.

According to the London-based Arabic-language newspaper al-Hayat, several documents show that the US has been providing assistance to Turkey's Kurdish separatist movement, the PKK. A report in Israel's Jerusalem Post said the US military documents refer to the PKK as "warriors for freedom and Turkish citizens" and say that the US had set free arrested PKK members in Iraq.

The documents also point out that US forces in Iraq have given weapons to the PKK and ignored the organisation's operations inside Turkey.

One of the documents to be released is also believed to charge Turkey with providing indirect assistance to the terrorist group al-Qaeda by failing to properly control the movement of people across its shared border with Iraq.