At the end of August 2023, reports became popular on the Russian-language Internet about how a Ukrainian telecom operator unintentionally disclosed information about the country’s real losses in the war. We checked whether there are reasons to trust such publications.
Viral posts report that on August 29, at Day of Remembrance of Defenders of Ukraine, Kyivstar launched a charity campaign - the company offered to send an SMS with the word “Thank you” to the number of a fallen soldier. Allegedly, the promotional video published on the telecom operator’s social networks accidentally included the information that “400,000 heroes will never answer the call again.” Posts about this were published by Telegram channels “Live broadcast» (713,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), “Putin on Telegram» (271,000), "Russia now» (269,000), "Truthfulness» (189,000) and many others; According to the TGStat service, the total reach of such messages exceeded 5 million views. Federal Russian media also wrote about the incident, in particular 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 the losses.”
There are no announcements about such a promotion and related media content on website and official pages Ukrainian telecom operator on social networks, as well as in web archives. The design of stories and videos differs from the Kyivstar corporate design for stories and reels on Instagram and videos for YouTube: Different fonts are used, and the text (with the exception of the words "Dyakuyu") is written without using capital letters.
The video, which the media and Telegram channels refer to, was allegedly posted on YouTube in shorts format, where it received 23,000 likes and 15,000 comments. Unlike quite popular standard rollers, shorts of the Kyivstar channel are recruited in average about 1000 views and several dozen likes. The abnormal number of likes and comments would probably have caused a significant number of reposts on other social networks, but “Verified” did not find any traces of links to such a video (as well as other screenshots) in Ukrainian-language blogs and social networks. Traffic analysis of the mobile operator's official YouTube channel also does not show any sharp jumps in views on August 29.
The company's press service on its official Facebook page also stated, that the Ukrainian operator did not launch such a charity event, and the video was falsified. Kyivstar believes that this is a disinformation attack “aimed at deliberately causing suffering to the relatives of the victims and causing a public outcry.” However, there was no resonance in Ukraine itself: as we wrote above, in the Ukrainian-language segment of the Internet, information about the incident did not become any popular - messages about the charity event were shared almost exclusively by biased Russian resources. The first of the “Verified” publications discovered appeared in the anonymous Telegram channel “Shkvarka News"On August 29 at 14:31 Moscow time and received less than 3,000 views, but an hour and a half later 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 announced losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces of 400,000 people, at the moment there is no publicly available (and until the end of hostilities there cannot be) any accurate and reliable information about the total number of Ukrainian military personnel killed or wounded since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion. Interlocutors of The New York Times among American officials give estimating up to 70,000 dead by mid-August 2023, without disclosing the calculation methodology or data sources. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in May reportedthat official Kyiv no longer comments on the losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (although in reality the authorities stopped doing this a few months earlier). “Verified” wrote in detail about the problems when calculating losses during combat operations in the analysis of a similar fake about matches in memory of 300,000 fallen Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers, distributed in May 2023. In general, similar arguments are valid when analyzing estimates of losses on the Russian side.
Thus, there is no reason to believe that messages about “400,000 dead heroes” were ever published on Kyivstar’s social networks. The design of the distributed screenshots does not correspond to the corporate style of the Ukrainian operator; there are no corresponding posts in the company’s official accounts and web archives, and Kyivstar itself denies their publication.
Cover photo: Gisela Merkuur from the site Pixabay
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