In mid-May 2023, a message was widely circulated on Telegram that the Ukrainian Football Association had announced matches dedicated to the memory of fallen soldiers. The authors of the posts emphasized that thanks to this, the real losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces became known. We have verified the authenticity of such publications.
The posts that went viral contain a video with the logo of the Ukrainian Football Association (UAF). Against the background of the stands, titles are shown announcing the holding of three matches in memory of the “300,000 heroes who fell for Ukraine.” The following video shows the schedule of matches and their location: Kyiv, NSC Olimpiyskiy. It is separately noted that the games will be held “in empty stadiums.”
On the evening of May 15th this video published in the Telegram channel of TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov (284,000 views). The caption to the post states that the video was deleted by the UAF immediately after publication because it contained information about 300,000 killed military personnel, and it is reported that the last person to voice such a figure was Robert Francis Kennedy Jr., “Biden’s main rival in the primaries of the US Democratic Party.” Solovyov also writes that “in November, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was criticized for publishing and then deleting a video containing an estimate of 100,000 Ukrainian military killed, which caused a negative reaction from Kyiv.”
By noon on May 18th data Telemetr, more than 240 publications have been published, completely or partially duplicating the message of the Solovyov channel; according to TGStat, their reach is over 5 million views. This story gained some popularity outside of Telegram: for example, in VK and on a number of "garbage" sites.
There is neither a short nor a long video about the holding of three memorable matches in Kyiv either on the official association channels on YouTube or in the web archives of these channels. There are no such messages on website UAF, and on the official Instagram account published refutation. At the same time registration Shorts videos on the official YouTube channel of the UAF are quite different from the design of the videos from the publications we analyzed in terms of image quality, fonts and style elements.
The earliest publication about memory matches that Verified was able to find was fast in the closed channel “Before everyone else. Well almost. Special Operation" - he appeared on May 15 at 11:15 Moscow time (seven and a half hours before Solovyov). It did not mention von der Leyen and Kennedy Jr., but in addition to the video, the post published screenshots of this video in the Shorts section on the UAF YouTube channel, comments under it and stories allegedly from the association’s official Instagram account. In the screenshot of the story, the match schedule was published with the caption “Skasovano” (“Canceled”), but the design of the stories in the official UAF account, as well as in YouTube, is in a certain format and does not correspond to what is shown in the screenshots on Telegram.
Screenshots of comments and the Shorts section are also not credible. Searching by commentator nicknames leads mainly to empty accounts, probably created solely for commenting (one nickname does not exist at all nowhere, except for the above screenshot). With rare exceptions, short videos of the UAF channel receive about 1,000 views, so the number of 123,000 views of the video and 2,000 comments on screenshots implies high user activity and, probably, a certain number of reposts. But, as we said above, there are no traces of placing links to the videos. There are also no traces of a surge in user activity on the channel.
In addition to the technical characteristics of the video and screenshots, the text of the captions also raises doubts about the authenticity of the information. Ukrainian fact checkers note, that its authors incorrectly translated the word “fallen” (“palikh” instead of the correct “poleglikh”). And we will note a logical inconsistency: in the video, one location for the matches is first indicated, the NSC Olimpiysky, and then the phrase “with empty stadiums” is used, as if there are several stadiums (this is very similar to an error when translating the phrase “with empty stands”). However, the very emphasis on the fact that the matches will be played with empty stands is illogical - in wartime, all matches in Ukraine are held without spectators. Finally, a shot of the empty stands of the Kyiv Olympic sports complex, used as the background of the video, removed Ukrainian blogger Oleg Totsky back in 2013.
Robert Kennedy Jr. was first mentioned in conjunction with this video, apparently in a post on the Telegram channel “Freshness”, published two hours after “Before everyone else” and five and a half hours before “Soloviev”. The figure of 300,000, which occupies a central place in all posts about memorial matches, was indeed announced by Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccination activist and nephew of US President John F. Kennedy. He announced this number of Ukrainians killed at the front in interview To Freddie Sayers May 3, 2023, without citing sources. At the moment, it is not possible to reliably estimate the number of deaths during hostilities - data released by officials of any of the parties to the conflict in war conditions is likely distorted, and open calculations can only be indirect, while more or less transparent. Kennedy's unsourced statement contradicts all available casualty data.
Intelligence data from Great Britain and the United States, different from Russian and Ukrainian and approximately coinciding with each other, as well as data from the European Commission, indicate that the number of military deaths is several times lower. So, during the period from November 2022 to March By 2023, officials in Europe and the United States estimated Ukrainian army losses at 100,000 to 120,000 killed and wounded. By the way, this is where von der Leyen’s slip came from - she mixed up combat losses and the number of killed, for which she later apologized and didn't hide the fact that the video with her statement was edited (the actual reservation was cut out of the video). The number announced by Kennedy does not seem adequate because even taking into account the sharp increase due to mobilization, 300,000 dead would account for almost half current number of members of the Armed Forces of Ukraine according to Ukrainian data and more than half - according to comparative estimates research Statista, based on data from the Stockholm Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
To complete the picture, we note that Robert Francis Kennedy Jr., who in many publications with the alleged UAF video is named Joe Biden’s main competitor in the US Democratic Party primaries, is not such (the main competitor), it is at least premature to talk about this, and at most, groundless. Firstly, not all prospective candidates have yet announced their participation in the primaries, which will begin only in February 2024. Secondly, recent polls show that Kennedy’s rating is very far from high: according to data According to Big Village's regular survey, only 7.3% of Democratic Party respondents believe he should become a candidate for president. For comparison, Biden has 30.4%, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has 15%, Vice President Kamala Harris has 11.8%, and Secretary of Transportation Pitt Buttigieg has 7.7%. Kennedy Jr.'s involvement in the Memorial Match story likely has a lot to do with the fact that during the COVID-19 pandemic he dialed quite popular among anti-vaxxers, including on the Russian-language Internet, and his name sounds respectable enough (a member of a well-known family in the United States and beyond) for the activist to play the role of authority. In addition, Kennedy Jr., since the announcement of his participation in the primaries became a permanent hero of the Russian pro-government press.
As a result, we have a mix of a video edited from 2013 with lexical and logical errors, fake screenshots, a number of distortions and one assumption from a well-known conspiracy theorist, not based on any authoritative or verifiable sources. Funny incident: the authenticity of the video (however, in a very peculiar way) denied closely connected with the Russian authorities, the Ministry of Pravda channel, posing as a fact-checking project.
Cover image: Valery Ded. File:Kyiv NSC Olimpiyskyi 6.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0
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