STORY UPDATED: check for updates below.

Fake Graph

Did Statista publish a graph detailing the nationalities of the people described as "mercenaries" who fought for Ukraine and were killed in the Kursk region of Russia? No, that's not true: The data on the Statista website doesn't show the graph shared on social media. Unlike authentic charts published by that company, the graph omitted the source of the figures and showed the Liberian flag in the column purporting to detail the data about the U.S. In an email to Lead Stories, a spokesperson for Statista denied any association with the graph.

The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on April 15, 2025. It included what seemed to be a screenshot with the Statista logo on the bottom. The image showed a graph titled:

The nationality of the mercenaries whose bodies were found in the Kursk region, Russia.

The subheading linked the supposed figures to the casualties of the Armed Forces of Ukraine:

The number of bodies of foreign mercenaries who fought for the AFU that were found in Russia.

This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:

(Source: X screenshot by Lead Stories)

Statista (archived here) describes itself as "a global data and business intelligence platform with an extensive collection of statistics, reports, and insights on over 80,000 topics from 22,500 sources in 170 industries" that was launched in Germany in 2007.

On April 17, 2025, a spokesperson for the company told Lead Stories via email:

Categorically: This infographic was not produced by Statista and we in no way associate ourselves with the data presented in it.

One detail that calls into question the authenticity of the graph is the use of the Liberian national flag (archived here) in the icon for U.S. data, as better seen on the screenshot below produced with the Magnifier tool in the InVid verification plugin (archived here):

(Source: InVid screenshot by Lead Stories)

The design of the graph looked similar to what was published on the Statista websites (archived here) in 2022 but that example discussed international aid to Ukraine, not "mercenaries".

In 2025, a chart with the title seen in the post on X did not appear on the company's list of statistics about the Russian-Ukrainian war (archived here):

(Source: Statista screenshot by Lead Stories)

A Google search across the Statista website for the keywords "Kursk" and "mercenaries" did not show a single match:

(Source: Google screenshot by Lead Stories)

Furthermore, unlike the viral image, authentic Statista graphs reviewed by Lead Stories named a specific source of the presented information.

The image of the fake graph was promoted by Russian pro-war resources on Telegram (archived here) and X (here).

One the earliest examples of the claim (archived here) appeared on an English-language website En.Topcor.ru on April 14, 2025. In the past, this Russia-registered website spread Russian propaganda narratives about the COVID-19 pandemic (archived here) and false (archived here) claims about Ukraine.

Read more

Other Lead Stories fact checks of the claims concerning the war in Ukraine are here.