Is it true that the Ukrainian film company launched the “It wasn’t worth it” campaign about the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ counter-offensive?

In December 2023, footage from a video allegedly filmed and shown in Ukraine with the aim of reconciling society with the current state of affairs at the front went viral on the Internet. We checked whether such a video was actually created by Film.ua.

As stated in the news, the Ukrainian film company Film.ua is “preparing the audience for a 180-degree turn” - on its YouTube channel it allegedly launched a broadcast of a video in which dead Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers, “revitalized” by a neural network, say: “It wasn’t worth it” (Ukrainian: “It wasn’t worth it”). It is alleged that in this way the inhabitants of the country are being prepared to accept the theses “The counter-offensive failed” and “The peace initiatives in Istanbul should have been signed.” Publications in the media and posts on social networks are accompanied by a nine-second video, allegedly recorded from the official Film.ua page on YouTube.

The news was disseminated, in particular, by the publications “Mriya", "Constantinople" And "No format", as well as numerous Telegram channels, including "Russia now"(225,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Sheikh Tamir"(123,000), "Peacemaker"(68,000), Rogandar News (45,000) and "BayBiden"(42,000).

Film.ua Group is a large Ukrainian group of companies in the field of film and television production. She has her own channel on YouTube with almost 4 million subscribers. This account has been verified and has a corresponding icon next to it. But on the viral video there is no such tick.

In the mobile version of YouTube, there is no verification icon next to the channel name (as is the case with other accounts), but the entire design (from fonts to colors) is completely different.

“Verified” did not find any traces of the viral video on the Film.ua Group YouTube channel. There are no mentions of it in the Ukrainian media, although the potentially very resonant (considering both the topic and the size of the audience) broadcast should not have missed the mass audience.

Photos of the dead Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers for the video were taken from a special Ukrainian memorial site. The website has chapter, dedicated to how to correctly and ethically talk about this sensitive topic. Obviously, the creators of the viral video did not receive permission to use these photographs, because its very idea (“reviving” the fighters and putting defeatist ideas in their mouths) contradicts the position of the memorial platform. 

Fact checkers from the StopFake project contacted at Film.ua Group for comment. They denied the presence of such a video: “Of course, this content is unacceptable for us, and such videos did not appear on our official YouTube channel.”

According to the TGStat service, the first resource to distribute a viral video on Telegram was on December 8 at 11:50 Moscow time the channel of a Russian TV presenter Olesya Loseva. “Verified” previously examined other cases when the spread of fake news began from this channel. photo And video about Ukraine.

Thus, the video distributed in the media and social networks appears to be fake. It is not on the Film.ua Group YouTube channel, the details in the screenshot do not correspond to the design of this account on the platform, the group of companies itself denied the existence of the video, and the news spread after publication in one of the Russian pro-war Telegram channels.

Cover photo: screenshot from social networks

Fake

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