Kremlin disinformation agents love to “eliminate” Polish volunteers online. This time, the Russian propaganda have drawn in the Czechs as well.
According to the TASS news agency, later echoed by other Russian outlets, “A group of foreign mercenaries from the 47th Independent Mechanised Brigade of the Ukrainian army was destroyed in a precision air strike. Among the dead are Czech and Polish mercenaries.”
This allegedly resulted from a “carefully planned air strike supported by artillery fire and heavy Solsntsepyok rocket systems.”
На Украине точным авиаударом уничтожены чешские и польские наемники
How do they know the victims were Czech and Polish? Russian media do not say. One outlet simply illustrated its article with a photo of soldiers in trenches, captioned “Polish and Czech mercenaries fighting on the side of the Ukrainian army.” In reality, the photo shows Ukrainian soldiers training in the United Kingdom.
Reports of Polish volunteers supposedly killed at the front appear frequently in Kremlin narratives—usually without any details, though sometimes accompanied by numbers.
For example, Russian propagandists concocted a story claiming that 4,781 volunteers (whom they label “mercenaries”) supporting Ukraine were killed in fighting in Russia’s Kursk Oblast, parts of which were briefly occupied by Ukrainian forces in 2024 and largely retaken by Russia in 2025. A staggering 1,963 of them were allegedly Polish.
These fabricated figures circulated in Russian—including English-language— media, presented in an infographic supposedly from Statista, the world renowned German company specialising in data collection and visualisation.
Russian disinformation agents made little effort to imitate Statista accurately: the forgery is clumsy, featuring, for example, the Liberian flag instead of the U.S. flag, and an incorrect British flag.
State Duma deputy Aleksandr Borodai “eliminated” many more Poles in virtual form.
“During the Special Military Operation, the Poles themselves have lost—I stress—not wounded and killed together, not the ‘300s’ (wounded) and not the ‘200s’ (killed), but exclusively killed—about 15,000 of their fighters. These are impressive numbers,” he claimed.
Supposedly, 15,000 Poles were killed in Ukraine. Who is behind this claim?
In reality, several dozen Polish citizens have died in Ukraine. December 4, 2025 marked the third anniversary of the deaths of Janusz Szeremeta and Krzysztof Tyfel, among the first Poles to fall fighting the Russian army.
The most recent confirmed death of a Polish citizen fighting for Ukraine dates to January 2025, when 19-year-old Filip Antosiak was killed near Pokrovsk.
Ukraine bid farewell to him at St. Michael’s Cathedral in Kyiv. His body was then brought to Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square). Over the coffin, draped with the flags of Poland and Ukraine, the national anthems of both countries were played as a Ukrainian honour guard stood by. Filip Antosiak was laid to rest in Łowicz.
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