Citing Fabricated Front Pages, Russian Diplomats and Media Push Claim that 70,000 Ukrainians Died in Kursk, Russia
By Eva Maitland and Chine Labbe
What happened: Russian diplomats, state media, and pro-Kremlin news sites are citing fake newspaper covers to baselessly claim that 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers died during Ukraine’s seven-month-long incursion into the Russian territory of Kursk.
A European diplomatic source who asked not to be named shared with NewsGuard the official Russian presentation at the March 19 closed-door session of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Security Forum in Vienna, Austria. The Russian diplomats’ OSCE presentation included fake page-one covers of newspapers including Britain’s Hull Daily Mail.
The presentation included a slide showing the purported Hull Daily Mail cover and other fabricated newspaper covers in a slide that stated, “The West is increasingly disappointed with AFU’s incursion into Kursk.”
The narrative apparently aims to paint Ukraine’s Kursk operation as a disaster and to undermine Ukrainian morale and Western support.
A closer look: In early March 2025, as the Russian army pushed Ukraine into a partial retreat in Kursk, pro-Kremlin social media sources baselessly claimed that 70,000 Ukrainian troops had died during the operation.
Later in the month, these sources shared an image purporting to show the front page of British local newspaper the Hull Daily Mail (Trust Score: 100/100), headlined, "70,000 Ukrainian soldiers in the Kursk region died in vain."
From March 7 to March 31, there were approximately 7,000 articles and social media posts jointly mentioning “Kursk” and “70,000,” according to a media monitoring tool.
The claim was amplified by the Russian Defense Ministry and Russian state news outlets RIA Novosti (Trust Score: 12.5/100) and TASS (Trust Score: 15/100) as well as pro-Kremlin sites, EADaily.com (Trust Score: 12.5/100), Lenta.ru, and the Pravda network (Trust Score: 7.5/100), which amplifies Russian disinformation in dozens of languages.
Actually: The newspaper covers are all fake, NewsGuard determined. And there is no evidence that 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers were killed in Kursk.
While the number of Ukrainian fatalities in the Kursk incursion is not known, multiple estimates indicate that the total number of Ukrainian troops deployed in Kursk ranged from 5,000 to 12,000, according to The Associated Press (Trust Score: 100/100).
France’s delegation to the OSCE stated in a March 26 X post about the Russian presentation, “Such blatant manipulations have no room in diplomatic forums. We will not be distracted and will continue to stand by the facts.” A U.K. delegate at the OSCE meeting, Ankur Narayan, said in a March 27 statement that the presentation was “a deliberate attempt to manipulate the representatives in this Forum” and “represented an egregious departure from the norms of conduct in international organizations.”