Antifake / Factcheck

31 снежня 2024

Fact-Checking Belarusian Media's Claim of Millions of Ukrainian Losses in a US TV Report

The Weekly Top Fake team identified the original video that had been excerpted by the Telegram channel.

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Fake appearance date: 11.12.2024
A pro-government Telegram channel in Belarus claimed that a US TV channel  reported high losses for the Ukrainian forces and provided a video from ABC News as evidence. The Weekly Top Fake team discovered that the original footage was about a different topic.

On December 11, 2024, the Telegram channel “Zemlya Nasha” published a post with a 15-second video from ABC News allegedly about high Ukrainian losses in the war.

“Zelenskyy continues to assert that there are minimal losses in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, but on the American TV channel ABC News, they don’t seem to care about his image. They immediately discuss a million killed and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians left without arms and legs. At the same time, the journalists refer to the survivors in the fire as ‘incredible’ — ‘Incredible.’ In a certain sense, one could agree with them; they are indeed incredible,” the caption of the video stated.

The Weekly Top Fake team identified the original video that had been excerpted by the Telegram channel. It was a five-minute segment from ABC News, aired in March 2023, focusing on wounded Ukrainian servicemen undergoing rehabilitation in the United States. The Telegram channel used random clips from this report and added a different voiceover.