At first glance, the video that has been widely shared on X and TikTok since November 2 is a tearjerker. It claims to show a young Ukrainian soldier – more boy than man – crying and saying he doesn’t want to go and fight:
"They mobilised me. I am leaving for Chasiv Yar [Editor’s note: a town in the Donetsk oblast, or administrative region, in eastern Ukraine]. Help me, I don’t want to die. I am only 23. Help me, please.”
"Ukraine is sending its young people to the slaughterhouse,” commented one social media user who posted the video on X. This user commonly shares both anti-Semitic and pro-Russian views.
This video isn’t the only one – dozens of similar videos have also been circulating on other social media platforms, especially TikTok. These videos claim to show Ukrainian soldiers deployed against their will to Pokrovsk, an important strategic town in the Donbas region that is the epicentre of a Russian offensive:
"They are bringing us to Pokrovsk, we don’t want to go, please.
Someone help us, please.
We don’t know what to do, they are bringing us by force.
My god, mama, mama, I don’t want to."
Fake videos generated by artificial intelligence
While it is true that the Ukrainian army has been reckoning with a growing number of desertions in recent months and that many Ukrainian men do want to avoid serving, these videos are fake. They were all generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
There are a few clues.
First of all, the videos of Ukrainian soldiers claiming that they don’t want to be deployed to Pokrovsk feature a watermark: an image of a small cloud and the word Sora. That’s the visual logo – or signature – of Sora 2, an artificial intelligence video generator created by OpenAI which puts these watermarks on generated videos in an attempt to prevent them from being used out of context.
The video of the 23-year-old soldier supposedly being shipped off to Chasiv Yar doesn’t have a watermark. However, we have previously reported in another article that the Sora AI watermark can be removed. And there are other clues that this video, too, was generated by AI.
First, the description of his circumstances that the soldier gives doesn’t align with how conscription actually works in Ukraine. The soldier claims that he was conscripted when he was 23. However, the Ukrainian parliament set the age for military service in Ukraine at 25. People under that age can volunteer, but they can’t be conscripted.
The helmet that the soldier is wearing also features anomalies – clues that it was generated by artificial intelligence. The man is wearing a NIJ IIIA ballistic helmet (which offers protection against 9mm bullets). However, there are differences between the helmet the “soldier” is wearing and the real helmet, which you can see on a specialist site. For example, a screw that appears round on the real helmet looks deformed in the AI-created video. The helmet in the video has a round piece that doesn’t appear on the real model. AI has a tendency to add elements when it is generating images of objects.
All of these videos of fake Ukrainian soldiers came from the same TikTok profile – "fantomoko". This account’s watermark appears on these videos.
The profile, now offline, seems to have published mainly fake, AI-generated videos. A large number of the videos shared by this account feature the Sora 2 watermark as well as the hashtags #fakeall and #sora2.
The Russian streamers whose identities were stolen
Italian fact-checking outlet open.online first reported a strange detail about these videos and the identity theft behind them. They seemed to be created from the faces of Russian streamers – users who stream themselves live on social media – in this case, while playing video games.
The Sora 2 AI video generator only takes a few seconds to create "deepfakes", which appear to show real people speaking with real voices but in fact are artificial.
The supposed 23-year-old soldier featured in the video was created using the face of kussia88, a Russian streamer with a Twitch profile that has 1.3 million followers.
The soldier complaining about being shipped to Pokrovsk was generated using videos of Russian streamer Aleksei Gubanov, known as "JesusAVGN". Gubanov actually opposes Russian Presdient Vladimir Putin’s regime and is now based in the United States.
Our team spoke to Aleksei Gubanov, who was horrified by the way his face was used to create these videos:
“I have no connection whatsoever to these videos – all of them were created by someone using the Sora neural network.
Moreover, I personally drew attention to these videos during my recent livestream, and I warned my audience that someone is deliberately trying to sow discontent in society by spreading such content. These materials play directly into the hands of Russian propaganda and cause serious harm to Ukraine, as they quickly gain a large number of views – and people, unfortunately, tend to believe them.”
The Centre for Countering Disinformation, a body linked to the Ukrainian government, spoke out about the video of the 23-year-old soldier. They described the video as fake news that “promotes the narrative of conscription at the age of 22-23” despite the fact that the age of military service is still 25. The aim of this disinformation campaign? "To sow distrust within Ukrainian society, disrupt mobilisation efforts and discredit Ukraine in the eyes of the international community,” the organisation said on X.
This article has been translated from the original in French.
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