Did viral videos document that Ukrainian soldiers started to surrender en masse in Pokrovsk, as of November 5, 2025? No, that's not true: The clips showed a watermark of a generative AI tool. As of this writing, Ukraine denied that its soldiers in Pokrovsk were surrendering in large numbers.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here and here) published on X on November 5, 2025. It opened:
A catastrophic situation is now developing in the strategic city of Pokrovsk, where thousands of Ukrainian soldiers are surrendering to the Russian army.....
The post included three videos that purported to show people in military uniform.
This is what it looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at x.com/ricwe123)
A closer look at individual videos opened in a larger preview mode, however, showed the Sora watermark (archived here):
(Sources: Lead Stories screenshots of post at x.com/ricwe123, composite image by Lead Stories; Lead Stories reduced contrast in the third screenshot to make the Sora watermark better visible)
Sora is a generative AI tool that produces highly realistic videos from textual prompts and had already worried (archived here) disinformation experts who warned about the increased believability of deepfakes, a pattern well-documented by Lead Stories.
The first clip purported to show a moment when several Ukrainian soldiers first approach the Russians with a white flag, begging to spare their lives. They spoke in strange, inauthentic-sounding high-pitched voices, and their words resembled the context of staged war propaganda videos much more than a spontaneous, unscripted exchange at the battlefield:
Мы сдаемся. Оружия нет. Не стреляйте, пожалуйста. Русские, простите нас. Мы хотим жить, мы поняли, что это все зря, нам нечего здесь делать. Народ России, прости!
As translated by Ukrainian-speaking Lead Stories staff:
We are surrendering. We have no weapons. Please don't shoot. Russians, forgive us. We want to live. We realized that this is all pointless, that we have no business being here. People of Russia, forgive us!
The video showed other discrepancies, too. For example, it opened with the sounds of heavy breathing, but that contradicted the behavior of the people in the frame who were seen standing still.
In the background, one man lacked the face, and another one's facial features showed the paleness that seemed unnatural for a living human:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshots of post at x.com/ricwe123)
Absence of faces was also an issue in the second video:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshots of post at x.com/ricwe123)
As seen in the screenshot above, the supposed "Ukrainian soldiers" lacked national symbols on their uniforms; their clothes showed no ranks or emblems associated with their branches of the armed forces or specific units.
The third video purported to show Ukrainian service members standing still while holding their hands behind their heads, as if that was an order. That order -- to keep hands in this position -- was indeed heard in the audio, but it was followed by another order that somehow every POW from the video felt comfortable disobeying while faced with the armed captors:
Шевелитесь! Вперед пошли, смотрим под ноги! Без оружия, всё -всё -всё... Быстрее! Шагай, Петро!
As translated by Lead Stories, the combination of yelling male voices from behind the camera commanded:
Move! Forward, watch your step! No weapons, that's it, that's it, that's it... Faster! Walk, Petro!
In one of the very few instances when Ukrainian national symbols were seen in the video, the image of the flag was attached to the uniform upside-down: It would only display the correct order of colors -- blue above yellow (archived here) -- if that person stands with their hands up:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshots of post at x.com/ricwe123)
Lead Stories studied publicly available images of uniform-wearing Ukrainian soldiers, but could not find any examples of the national flag and the Ukrainian coat of arms placed below one's elbow in the same fashion as in the given Sora video. The patches with the national symbols are typically attached to the uniform much higher, in the bicep area (archived here).
Pokrovsk (archived here) is a city in the Donetsk region that has been a scene of intense fighting in the Russian-Ukrainian war for over a year. On November 4, 2025, German public broadcaster DW published a feature article (archived here) about the situation on location based on the interviews with military experts and Ukrainian service members. It said nothing about the Ukrainian military surrendering in droves there. On November 5, 2025, Reuters reported (archived here) that Russia claimed its troops were already in the city and advised that Ukrainian forces should surrender; Ukraine, according to the same Reuters dispatch, denied that such a mass surrender had taken place and said that its military was fighting back.
