Is it true that 4781 foreigners who fought on the side of Ukraine died in the Kursk region?

In April 2025, Telegram channels, citing the Statista platform, reported: the Russian military killed almost 5,000 foreign “mercenaries” in the Kursk region, who fought as part of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. We checked the reliability of this news.

Since April 14, Telegram has been distributed in the Statista logo-a large online platform engaged in collecting and visualization of data. From the schedule with the heading “Citizenship of the mercenaries whose bodies were discovered in the Kursk region, Russia” it follows that by April 10, 2025, during the battles in this Russian region, citizens of nine countries who fought on the side of Ukraine were killed - at least 4781 people. The vast majority of the dead were citizens of Poland, Georgia and Colombia, and among them the French, Germans, Americans, British, Australians and Japanese are included. In Telegram, posts with this infographics have published such channels as "The call sign Bruce"(316,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), Colonelcassad (202 000), "SLOWERS+"(231 000),"Uncle Glory"(171 000),"Putin in Telegram"(156 000),"Belarusian security officer"(136 000), Condottiero (131 000) and "Sheikh Tamir"(111 000), as well as TV presenters Vladimir Solovyov (244,000 views) and Ruslan Ostashko (87 000).

Since the beginning of a full -scale invasion, Russian propaganda claims that on the side of Ukraine Fighting Numerous foreign mercenaries, ""Serious professionals directed by various special services, ministries of defense". Although in the ranks of the Armed Forces there really is Volunteers From different countries, the pro -Khremlin media, judging by open sources, noticeably exaggerate their number and role in the Ukrainian army. This is done, including at the expense Fakes About the dead at the front high -ranking officers And ordinary mercenaries From NATO countries and other states.

At first glance, the encircled infographics really similar to those that spread Statista. However, the important difference is that the platform always indicates from which source it takes data for visualization. In most cases, Statista uses information from open sources, but sometimes relies on the results of his own research and surveys.

In addition, the creators of infographics made errors that are uncharacteristic for such a large platform as Statista. So, in two cases, out of nine, the wrong flags of the countries were used: the flag of Liberia instead of the US flag and the flag of New Zealand instead of the flag of Australia.

Search for the name of infographics on the website Statista.com does not give out No results. “Verified” also did not find this infographics on the official pages of the platform in social networks. The LEAD Stories factor project turned to Statista for a comment and received answerthat they did not publish such data. “This infographic was not created by Statista, and we in no way associate ourselves with the data presented in it,” the representative of the platform said. 

The earliest publication that contained this infographics and which managed to find “verified” appeared on April 14 at 15:18 Moscow time in the Telegram channel “Military observer". This channel is repeatedly mentioned In the analysis of “tested” as a distributor, and sometimes the source of misinformation. 

Thus, the infographic distributed on social networks is a fake falsely attributed to the Statista platform.

Photo on the cover: UNSPLASH

Fake

What do our verdicts mean?

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