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In September 2023, a story became popular that a certain travel company from France, as part of an advertising campaign, spoke about the real losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. We checked if this is true.
The messages, illustrated with a photo of a cemetery decorated with Ukrainian flags with the caption “out of 500,000 Ukrainian military dead” in French, circulated on Telegram on September 12. The text accompanying the picture reported on the campaign of a French travel agency called “See a world without war” - its participants were allegedly offered to “download a photo of one of the 500,000 dead and photograph it against the backdrop of some landmark,” and a trip around the world was named as a prize (how the winner will be determined is not specified). The fact that in this way the advertising campaign allegedly “revealed the real losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine” was written, among others, by Telegram channels “Live broadcast"(591,000 views at the time of writing the analysis), "Truthfulness"(162,000), "Federation" (65,000) and "Military observer"(44,000). The name of the travel agency is not mentioned in any of the messages, and none of them contain hyperlinks.
Search by keywords, the exact phrase from the picture, as well as by the supposed name of the promotion in French (Voir un monde sans guerre) and in combination with the promised prize in the form of a trip around the world (tour du monde, croisiere) did not produce results.
Searching the image in Google and Yandex also does not give an exact match, but after examining the image, “Verified” found in the upper right corner the logo of the French newspaper Le Monde, which is used for video design in the publication’s official accounts in YouTube And Instagram. The details captured in the frame: two massive white crosses, fences and the design of the burials made it possible to establish the location of the shooting.
The photo shows the Field of Mars near the Lychakiv cemetery in Lviv. In the mid-1990s, the remains of victims of Stalin's repressions were reburied there under sandstone crosses. Long at that time these were the only monuments in this place. Since April 2022, fallen Ukrainian military personnel began to be buried on the Champ de Mars; it now functions as a memorial cemetery.
Using a photo with the logo of a major French newspaper seems illogical for a promotion by a travel company. The very idea of the promotion, based on an offer to download one of 500,000 photos, also looks implausible. To do this, at a minimum, it is necessary to create a website on which photographs will be posted in fairly good quality, probably with a short biography or at least the name of the deceased military man. Creating such a photo archive, and subsequently an Internet resource, will require a long work of a team of developers and designers. By comparison, the popular stock site Pixabay has hosted just over 1 million files in its 12 years of operation. The site of the alleged action, even if it had actually been launched, could not have disappeared without a trace, but “Verified” did not find any traces of its existence on the Internet.
The reader is also asked to believe that the French travel agency is better informed than the world's largest intelligence agencies. As already wrote “Verified”, there are no accurate data on the number of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers killed during a full-scale war and, probably, there will not be until the end of hostilities. Russia and Ukraine do not disclose their own casualty figures, but Western intelligence estimates, data leaks and officials are significantly lower than those indicated in viral publications. So, in mid-August, American officials assessed the total number of Russian and Ukrainian losses in total killed and wounded is 500,000 people, separately for the Armed Forces of Ukraine - 70,000 killed and from 100,000 to 120,000 wounded.
Finally, the figure of 500,000 Ukrainian military deaths does not correlate with publicly available data on the size of the Ukrainian army. By official data and results of comparative research Statista, based on open data, at the end of 2022 - beginning of 2023, the number of active military personnel in Ukraine was estimated in the range between 500,000 And 700,000 Human. That is, according to the lower estimate, with such losses, the Ukrainian army would simply not exist at the moment.
Thus, there is no evidence that the promotion from the French travel agency actually existed. The data collected by “Verified” allows us to assert that this is the next, already third, publication in a series of fakes about the real losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Previously, we analyzed stories about how event organizers in Ukraine “accidentally let slip” about 300,000 And 400,000 dead military personnel. Both of them turned out to be fabricated, and both spread the same Telegram channels.
Update September 27, 2023: The text clarifies the search queries used by “Verified” during the analysis. The version of the analysis before the update is made is available at link.
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