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In September 2023, the story became popular that a certain tourist company from France as part of an advertising campaign spoke about real losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. We checked whether this is so.
Messages illustrated by a photograph of the cemetery decorated with Ukrainian flags with the inscription "out of 500,000 dead Ukrainian military" in French spread to Telegram on September 12. The text accompanying the picture reported on the action of the French Tourist Agency under the name “See the World without War”-its participants were allegedly offered to “download photos of one of 500,000 dead and photograph it against a background of any attractions”, and as a prize (as they will determine the winner, not specified) a round-the-world trip. The fact that in this way the advertising campaign allegedly “revealed the real losses of the Armed Forces” wrote among other Telegram channels “Live broadcast"(591,000 views at the time of writing of 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 contains hyperlinks.
Search by keywords, an accurate phrase from the picture, as well as by the alleged name of the action 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, Croisière) did not give results.
Search by the picture in Google and Yandex also does not give an exact coincidence, but, having studied the image, “verified” found in the upper right corner the logo of the French newspaper Le Monde, used to decorate the video in the official accounts of the publication in the publication YouTube And Instagram. Details that have fallen into the frame: two massive white crosses, fences and burial design - allowed us to establish a place for filming.
The photo captures Marse field near the Lychakovsky cemetery in Lviv. Under the crosses of sandstone in the mid-1990s, the remains of the victims of the Stalinist repressions were reburied there. Long It was the only monuments in this place. Since April 2022, the dead Ukrainian military began on the Marse Field, now it is functioning as a memorial cemetery.
Using a photo with the logo of a large French newspaper seems to be illogical for the campaign of a travel company. The very idea of a promotion, based on a sentence, download one of 500,000 photographs, looks implausible. To do this, at least you need to create a site on which pictures will be posted in fairly good quality, probably with a brief biography or at least the name of the deceased military. The creation of such a photo archive, and after it and the Internet resource will require the long work of the developers and designers team. For comparison: Pixabay posted a little more than 1 million files for 12 years of work on the popular stock site. The site of the alleged action, even if it were really launched, could not disappear without a trace, but no traces of its existence on the network were “tested”.
Also, the reader is invited to believe that the French tourist agency is better aware of the world's largest intelligence. Like already It wrote “Tested”, there are no accurate data about the number of those who died during a full-scale war of the Ukrainian and Russian military and, probably, will not be before the end of hostilities. Russia and Ukraine do not disclose the numbers of its own losses, but the assessment of Western intelligence, data leaks And officials are significantly lower than indicated in viral publications. So, in mid -August, American officials Assessed The total number of Russian and Ukrainian losses aggregate and wounded in 500,000 people, separately in the Armed Forces of Ukraine - 70,000 killed and from 100,000 to 120,000 wounded.
Finally, the figure of 500,000 dead Ukrainian military does not correlate with open data on the number of the Ukrainian army. By official data and results of comparative research Statista based on open data, at the end of 2022 - the beginning of 2023, the number of existing military personnel in Ukraine was estimated in the range between 500,000 And 700,000 Human. That is, according to the lower assessment with such losses of the army of Ukraine, at the moment, it would simply not exist.
Thus, there is no evidence that the action from the French tourist agency existed in reality. The collected “verified” data allow us to say that this is another, already the third publication from a series of fakes about real loss of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Earlier we analyzed stories about how the organizers of events in Ukraine "accidentally spoke" about 300,000 And 400,000 dead military. Both of them turned out to be fabricated, and both Distributed The same Telegram channels.
Update on September 27, 2023: In the text, search queries used are “verified” during the analysis. The analysis version before the update is available by link.
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