ABC News segment altered to inflate Ukrainian soldier deaths

"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," says a December 12, 2024 X post from Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist who has previously shared misinformation.

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Screenshot from X taken December 16, 2024

The same altered 15-second video and claim have circulated elsewhere on X, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, Rumble and news websites. Russian media also amplified it, along with figures such as retired US Army colonel Douglas Macgregor and influencer Jackson Hinkle.

Pro-Kremlin disinformation frequently features edited or fake television news segments as part of an ongoing campaign to diminish Western support for Kyiv as the war in Ukraine continues to rage on.

A reverse image search using keyframes from the clip shared online reveals the original footage comes from a March 2023 ABC News report about Ukrainian soldiers being outfitted with prosthetic limbs in a New York hospital after they were injured by landmines (archived here).

The reporters do not discuss casualty estimates.

Hany Farid, a media forensics expert at the University of California-Berkeley, (archived here), said the audio from the clip was generated using artificial intelligence and was most likely created using software from ElevenLabs, a company that produces AI voice generation products.

The claim that one million Ukrainian soldiers have been killed appears to come from a speech that North Atlantic Treaty Organization chief Mark Rutte gave December 12, 2024.

Rutte said one million people -- including both Russians and Ukrainians -- had been killed or injured since February 2022 and called on members of the Western alliance to "turbo-charge" defense spending. He did not break down the figure into estimates of deaths and injuries on either side of the conflict, nor did he specify whether it included civilians.

"Every week, there are over 10,000 killed or wounded on all sides in Ukraine. Over one million casualties since February 2022," Rutte said (archived here).

Casualty estimates in Ukraine vary.

In October 2024, the US Department of Defense estimated that 57,500 Ukrainian soldiers had died while more than 250,000 suffered injuries (archived here).

The Economist approximated in November that between 60,000 and 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed, with around 400,000 injuries (archived here).

On the Russian side, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in December estimated casualties -- killed or wounded -- at around 700,000 (archived here). The Economist placed the number between 462,000 and 728,000 in July (archived here).

As for civilians, the United Nations confirmed in a November report more than 12,300 deaths and 27,800 injuries (archived here).

AFP contacted ABC News, but a spokesperson declined to comment.

AFP has debunked other claims about the war in Ukraine here.