Does a viral picture prove that U.S. citizens participated in Ukraine's incursion into the territory of Russia in August 2024? No, that's not true: The photo predates the attack by roughly two years. It has been online since the fall of 2022.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X, formerly known as Twitter, by @aussiecossack on August 13, 2024. It opened:
🇺🇸American mercenaries exposed invading Russia's Kursk region.
🤬What the fuck?
This is how the post appeared X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Tue Aug 13 18:14:57 2024 UTC)
On August 6, 2024 (archived here), Ukraine launched a cross-border attack into the Russian region of Kursk (archived here).
But the picture from the post on X has nothing to do with that: That image first appeared on Telegram (archived here) in September 2022. According to Ukrainian news websites Apostrophe.ua (archived here) and Slovoidilo.ua (archived here), it showed the soldiers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Balakliya, Ukraine, not in Russia's Kursk oblast.
Lead Stories contacted Ukraine's Armed Forces for additional comments.
The post that is the focus of this fact check was published by @aussiecossack, an account known for spreading false claims in the past. Lead Stories debunked them here and here.
That account belongs to a man named Simeon Boikov (archived here). His bio (archived here) says that he broadcasts for the Russian state-sponsored Sputnik News.
Other Lead Stories fact checks about the Russian-Ukrainian war can be found here.
