At the end of August 2023, reports of the Russian -speaking Internet became popular about how the Ukrainian telecom operator unintentionally revealed information about the real losses of the country in the war. We checked whether there are reason to trust such publications.
In viral posts it is reported that on August 29, in Memory of memory of defenders of Ukraine, Kyivstar launched a charitable campaign - the company offered to send an SMS with the word “thank you” to the number of a fallen soldier. Allegedly, the information published in the social networks of the telecom operator accidentally got information that "400,000 heroes will never answer the call." Posts about this published Telegram channels "Live broadcast" (713,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Putin in Telegram" (271 000), "Russia now" (269,000), "Truthfulness" (189,000) and many others; According to the TGSTAT service, the total coverage of such messages exceeded 5 million views. The federal Russian media, in particular, also wrote about the incident TV channel "Tsargrad" And Lenta.ru. In some publications It is noted that the video was promptly deleted, as "Kyiv is trying to hide the truth about losses."
Announcements of such an action and concomitant media content are absent site and official Pages Ukrainian telecom operator in social networks, as well as in web archives. The design of the story and the roller differs from the branded design of Kiivstar for Storiz and Rils on Instagram and video for YouTube: Other fonts were used, and the text (with the exception of the words “uncle”) was written without the use of capital letters.
The video that the media and Telegram channels refer to was allegedly placed in YouTube in the format of Shorts, where he scored 23,000 likes and 15,000 comments. Unlike enough Popular standard rollers, the shorts of the channel "Kyivstar" is recruited in average About 1000 views and several dozen likes. The abnormal number of likes and comments would probably cause a significant number of reposts in other social networks, but no traces of references to a similar video (like other screenshots) in Ukrainian -speaking blogs and social networks “tested”. An analysis of the traffic of the official channel of the mobile operator in YouTube also does not show sharp lenses of views on August 29.
The company's press service on its official Facebook page also She saidThe Ukrainian operator did not launch such a charitable action, and the video is falsified. The Kyivstar believes that this is a misinformation attack, "aimed at intentional infliction of suffering to the relatives of the dead and a call of public resonance." However, the resonance did not work out in Ukraine itself: as we already wrote above, in the Ukrainian-speaking segment of the network, information about the incident that had occurred did not become any popular-almost exclusively engaged Russian resources shared reports on the charity event. The first of the discovered "verified" publications appeared in an anonymous Telegram channel "Tasking News"August 29 at 14:31 Moscow time and scored less than 3,000 views, but after an hour and a half, a slightly edited version of this post was posted by the channel"Sheikh Tamir"(118 000), and already in this form the message became popular.
As for the voiced losses of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces, then at the moment there is no precisely and reliable information about the total number of Ukrainian military, killed or wounded from the beginning of a full-scale Russian invasion before the end of the fighting). Interlocutors of The New York Times among American officials Give Assessment of up to 70,000 dead by mid -August 2023, without disclosing the calculation method and data sources. President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky in May reportedthat official Kyiv no longer commented on the losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (although in reality the authorities stopped doing this a few months earlier). Details about the problems in calculation of losses during the fighting “verified” wrote in the analysis of a similar fake about Memory matches 300,000 dead soldiers of the Armed Forcesspread in May 2023. In general, similar arguments are true in the analysis of the assessments of the losses of the Russian side.
Thus, there is no reason to believe that the reports of “400,000 dead heroes” have ever been published on the social networks of Kyivstar. The design of common screenshots does not correspond to the corporate identity of the Ukrainian operator, there are no corresponding posts in the official accounts of the company and web archives, and Kyivstar himself denies their publication.
Photo on the cover: Gislav Merkuur from the site Pixabay
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