Did an authentic ABC newscast state that "in 2.5 years of war, about a million Ukrainian soldiers have died"? No, that's not true: TrueMedia's AI detector found "substantial evidence" that the voice heard in the social media post was created by artificial intelligence. The ABC video was originally about wounded Ukrainian soldiers receiving prosthetic legs from a nonprofit.
The claim appeared in a post on X (archived here) on December 12, 2024. The caption read:
ABC NEWS: 'In just about 2.5 years of war about 1 million Ukrainian soldiers have died" and "hundreds of thousands have lost limbs.' All of this was preventable. They lost an entire generation.
This is what the post looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Wed Dec 18 14:45:13 2024 UTC)
The 15-second clip shows people walking using crutches or canes. There is Russian text in the lower third of the screen. Lead Stories has confirmed that the text is translating the English voiceover. An ABC logo with "NEWSLIVE PRIME" can be seen in the upper-right hand corner.
Lead Stories reverse image searched a screen grab from the video (archived here). The most reliable of the few results that appeared came from ABC themselves: an ABC article dated March 30, 2023, headlined "Wounded Ukrainian soldiers get prosthetic legs in US with help from nonprofit." The article included a 5:10-minute-long video that included the same clips as in the claim. Below are side-by-side examples; highlighting by Lead Stories:
(Source: X and ABC screenshots taken on Wed Dec 18 15:21:34 2024 UTC)
(Source: X and ABC screenshots taken on Wed Dec 18 15:26:09 2024 UTC)
(Source: X and ABC screenshots taken on Wed Dec 18 15:31:44 2024 UTC)
During the entire video in the ABC article, no one says a million Ukrainian soldiers have died.
Lead Stories ran this X post through TrueMedia's AI detection tool. The results (archived here) showed there was "substantial evidence" that the voice heard in the claim was manipulated. Further information about TrueMedia's findings are below:
(Source: Detect.truemedia.org screenshot taken on Wed Dec 18 16:12:13 2024 UTC)
More Lead Stories fact checks on claims surrounding the Ukraine-Russian war are here.
