Is it true that 4,781 foreigners who fought on the side of Ukraine died in the Kursk region?

In April 2025, Telegram channels, with reference to the Statista platform, reported: Russian soldiers, during battles in the Kursk region, killed almost 5,000 foreign “mercenaries” who fought as part of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. We have verified the accuracy of this news.

Since April 14, Telegram has been distributing infographics with the logo of Statista, a large online platform that collects and visualizes data. The graph, titled “Citizenships of Mercenaries Whose Bodies Were Found in the Kursk Region, Russia,” shows that by April 10, 2025, citizens of nine countries fighting for Ukraine—a total of at least 4,781 people—were killed during fighting in that Russian region. The vast majority of the dead were citizens of Poland, Georgia and Colombia, and also included French, Germans, Americans, British, Australians and Japanese. On Telegram, posts with this infographic were published by channels such as “Call sign Bruce"(316,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), Colonelcassad (202,000), "Sladkov+"(231,000), "Uncle Slava"(171,000), "Putin on 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 the full-scale invasion, Russian propaganda has claimed that it is on the side of Ukraine are fighting numerous foreign mercenaries, "serious professionals sent by various intelligence services, ministries of defense" Although in the ranks of the Armed Forces there really are volunteers from different countries, pro-Kremlin media, judging by open sources, noticeably exaggerate their number and role in the Ukrainian army. This is done, among other things, through fakes about those killed at the front high-ranking officers And ordinary mercenaries from NATO countries and other states.

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

In addition, the creators of the infographics made mistakes that are not typical for such a large platform as Statista. Thus, in two out of nine cases, the wrong country flags were used: the Liberian flag instead of the US flag and the New Zealand flag instead of the Australian flag.

Search by infographic title on statista.com doesn't show no results. “Verified” also did not find this infographic on the official pages of the platform on social networks. The fact-checking project Lead Stories contacted Statista for comment and received answerthat they did not publish such data. “This infographic was not created by Statista and we are in no way associated with the data presented in it,” a spokesperson for the platform said. 

The earliest publication that contained this infographic and which was found “Verified” appeared on April 14 at 15:18 Moscow time in the Telegram channel “Military observer" This channel many times mentioned in analyzes “Verified” as a distributor, and sometimes the primary source of misinformation. 

Therefore, the infographic being circulated on social media is a fake, falsely attributed to the Statista platform.

Cover photo: Unsplash

Fake

What do our verdicts mean?

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