In mid-December 2024, an excerpt from an ABC report was widely circulated online. It says that since the beginning of the war, Ukraine has lost 1 million soldiers killed and several hundred thousand more people were seriously injured. We have verified the authenticity of this video.
On December 11, news spread on social networks and the media claiming that the ABC television channel had reported a million dead in the ranks of the Ukrainian army. The text was accompanied by a 15-second video in English showing military personnel learning to use prosthetics. The video was allegedly filmed at a rehabilitation center. The voice-over talks about the losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces: “In just two and a half years of war, about a million Ukrainian soldiers died. And, according to the most optimistic forecasts, hundreds of thousands of them lost limbs. These statistics are incredible." The video is accompanied by Russian subtitles.
The video was published by Telegram channels “Voblya • news"(148,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Ukraine.ru"(136,000), "Oleg Tsarev"(100,000), "Release the KrakenZ!"(95,000), "Kot Kostyan - official channel"(80,000), etc. In addition, the news appeared on the social networks of the TV channel"Constantinople" and on the portal "Voice of the people"
Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, both sides have rarely disclosed their own military casualties. However, officials often overstated enemy losses. During active hostilities, it is almost impossible to know the real number of losses on both sides. International organizations And world leaders regularly voice their own assessments, and Media They are trying to calculate the number of deaths based on open sources, but their data also differ significantly. In September of this year, The Wall Street Journal, citing Ukrainian sources and Western intelligence data wrotethat the total losses of Russia and Ukraine in killed and wounded reached a million people. This data have been criticized, including the fact that the article does not indicate which category of wounded is meant, which is especially important when calculating the irretrievable losses of the army. Despite this, NATO also agrees with this assessment: the same figure named On December 12, Alliance Secretary General Mark Rutte.
December 8, President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky reportedthat since February 2022, the country has lost 43,000 military personnel killed and 370,000 wounded, of which half were able to return to duty and continue serving. US President-elect Donald Trump provided approximately the same data - according to his assessment, the losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces make up a total of 400,000 people.
Even the Russian authorities prone to overstate losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, they did not officially announce a million dead Ukrainian soldiers. On November 19 this year, TASS, citing its own calculations, assessed the number of Ukrainian Armed Forces losses is 900,000 people (killed and wounded). Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Federation Valery Gerasimov December 18 statedthat the total losses of Ukraine since the beginning of the war amounted to about a million people killed and wounded.
The ABC News Live Prime logo appears in the upper right corner of the viral video. This is the title of a news program on ABC with regular presenter Lindsay Davis, who daily illuminates major world events. In the final seconds of the video, the presenter of this episode, Kayna Whitworth, can be seen commenting on the story: “Simply incredible!” Considering that the video was distributed on December 11, the report on the losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces could be published in issues in the coming days, that is, on December 9 or 10. On the clock plot for December 10, the war in Ukraine is not mentioned at all, as well as December 9, and Kayna Whitworth doesn't appear in any of the videos. There is no information about the million dead Ukrainian soldiers on the official website either. ABC.
A search of footage from the viral video showed that they were indeed first published on the ABC YouTube channel. However this reportage, the heroes of which were the Ukrainian military, was released on March 29, 2023, that is, a year and a half before the news spread about a million dead in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The original story lasts 5 minutes and tells about the work of an American non-profit organization Kind Deeds, which provides prosthetics to Ukrainian soldiers who lost limbs in the war. The foundation facilitates the treatment of military personnel in Ukrainian hospitals, and then transports patients to the United States to receive prosthetics and rehabilitation in a specialized center.
The ABC report tells the stories of two soldiers, Roman and Oleg, who are recovering at Staten Island University Hospital. Both lost their legs in the war and learned to use prosthetics obtained with the assistance of Kind Deeds. The losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are not discussed at all in the video, but the phrase “Simply incredible!” has nothing to do with the losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. In fact, this is the presenter’s reaction to the story about the courage of the Ukrainian military.
The video, which has spread on social networks, consists entirely of footage from the original ABC report, but they are edited in a different order. Excerpts are used where only one of the soldiers is captured, while all frames where the man’s face is visible or speech is heard are cut out. At the beginning of the viral video, a military man learns to walk with a prosthetic left leg. The same frame in the original shown at the 02:35 mark. The voice-over explains that the soldier’s name is Oleg, he is 50 years old and he was wounded while performing a combat mission near the village of Davydov Brod. At the end of the viral video, Oleg enters the elevator of the rehabilitation center (the original video, on the contrary, begins with this).
The voiceover reading in the viral video does not sound like Lindsay Davis or Keyna Whitworth. Fact checkers of the Vox Ukraine project assumedthat the voiceover could have been created using artificial intelligence (AI), and checked the audio track using the AI Speech Classifier tool. It determines whether the audio was created through ElevenLabs, which uses AI to convert text to speech. An analysis by Vox Ukraine showed that the probability of such manipulation is 98%. “Checked” received a similar result.
This video was widely distributed in Russian-language blogs and media, but there are also similar posts in the English-language segment of the social network X. His published user @ivan_8848, but with English subtitles at the bottom of the screen. However, for the first time, a fake video was posted in the pro-Kremlin Telegram channel “Odessa for victory!” December 11 at 12:45 Moscow time. Immediately after the first publication, a video with an almost identical caption became diverge and through other channels. “Odessa for victory!” more than once mentioned in analyzes of “Verified” as a distributor of unreliable information and even the primary source of fake news. For example, this Telegram channel was the first to publish fake video NBC television channel, where an advertisement for the show “Great Thieves of the 21st Century” allegedly appeared during the greeting of Zelensky and Macron.
Thus, ABC did not publish a report about a million military deaths in the ranks of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The video distributed on the Internet is made up of frames from the original video of an American TV channel, but a voice-over created using AI is superimposed on top of these frames.
Cover photo: social networks
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- Is it true that CNN anchors mockingly sang a Christmas carol during a story about the eviction of Ukrainian refugees?
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