More than 3,500 foreign nationals fighting on Russia’s side have been killed in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, BBC journalists found, working alongside the independent Russian news outlet Mediazona to maintain a named list of the dead.
Among the foreign dead are 2,304 soldiers from North Korea, whose identities were established by the BBC Korean Service after examining satellite images and photographs of a new military memorial to the fallen in Pyongyang.
Another 1,285 of the dead came from more than 40 countries, including CIS states such as Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Azerbaijan, African nations, and countries farther afield: Cuba, Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, and Yemen.
According to NATO, roughly 24,000 foreign mercenaries from 44 countries are fighting in the Russian military, a senior alliance official told BBC News Russian at a summit in Ankara. A large portion of them come from African countries, he said.
In total, the named list maintained by the journalists now contains 233,033 names of military personnel killed on the Russian side.
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