Most of the currently identified mercenaries seem to have served in Donbas fighting Ukrainian Government forces before being deployed to Syria.

While we don’t expect any official acknowledgement of the dead from Wagner or their Russian government clients, we do expect to learn the identities of more of the dead mercenaries as family and friends mourn. The exact number of those killed in action remains unverified, but we have no reason to doubt the approximations.

More on the verification of the identities of the dead is included at the bottom of this report.

Online rumors and disinformation

Russian online image boards were some of the first among the public to catch wind of this story. The first recorded instance was a user on a popular military image board who shared a blog post on February 8, which claimed a minimum of 30–35 Russian losses. Moderators later banned the user who shared the blog post, along with other users posting about Russian losses near Deir ez-Zor. It wasn’t until February 10, however, that the story truly gained traction.

Russian internet users often refer to Wagner fighters as Musicians, a nod to the famous German composer Wilhelm Richard Wagner.

February 10 was the day that most social media claims of extraordinary casualty counts of Musicians began to surface. Igor “Strelkov” Girkin, for example, wrote a blog post, which claimed losses were in the hundreds, but shedding doubt on reports of losses as high as 600. Girkin’s reporting corroborated with consistent reporting among other social media sources that claimed a longstanding relation to Wagner. These sources formed consensus that the 5th Assault Team was destroyed and that casualties were around 200.

Posts from social media pages such as Project Partizan, Soldier of Fortune, and Nezygar mentioned incredible losses by PMC Wagner. The pages even fueled online humor about the incident, as users struggled to believe the news. Some jokes included crude military humor, copy and pasted in internet vernacular. Other humorous stories inlcuded misleading footage, which would later spread across the internet.

Moderators on a popular Russian image board even deleted posts on the site’s 565th Syria thread, but the posts were previously archived Wayback Machine. The posts were not deleted at random, but were removed in an attempt to conceal the site’s role in distributing disinformation — perhaps to keep the content from spreading further. While the intentions of the moderators may have been good, obscuring the original source of false information is problematic.

For instance on February 10, an anonymous user posted a reply to a message on the popular Telegram channel WarGonzo, which purported to describe the event from the perspective of a Wagner fighter. The reply featured an image depicting the results of a Russian artillery strike in Ukraine attached and read:

“A photo of this epic massacre.”

(Source: 2ch.hk/wm/ via Wayback Machine)

Users on the site found the image unconvincing and concluded that the image needed alterations to make it appear more authentic. The image was then flipped, recolored, and the white stripes on the trucks were removed to conceal the fact that they were Ukrainian.

(Source: 2ch.hk/wm/ via Wayback Machine)

Other users — joining in on the joke — suggested photoshopping in sand to make the image look more like it originated from the area near Deir ez-Zor. Ten minutes later, an anonymous user posted the following result.

(Source: 2ch.hk/wm/ via Wayback Machine)

Although the image spread quickly to different forums, users virtually everywhere pointed out that it was, in fact, a photoshop combining imagery from Ukraine with a picture taken by a Mars rover.

In one instance, a user posted the image to the Russian forum WarOnline. Again, other users were quick to point out the fake. This is in part because a reverse image search of the doctored image will yield results from the Mars mission.

YouTube

(Source: 2ch.hk/wm/ via Wayback Machine)

YouTube user Military-Political Review (Военно-Политическое Обозрение) posted a video titled “US Air Force strike on the column of PMC Wagner. FOX NEWS” (Удар ВВС США по колонне ЧВК Вагнер. Репортаж FOX NEWS). The video did show a real fox news segment, but there was no mention of the attack being on Wagner or Russia. The video was also shared in this thread and claimed that CNN reported that the U.S. initiated the fight.

A native English speaker might have easily understand that the footage in the video is labeled as stock and that the video does not mention any Russian PMC. The average Russian, however, might place more confidence in their ability to understand the title in their native language versus the English-language video. At the time of this report, the video had 56,898 views with an overwhelmingly negative “dislike” ratio. In the comments, a few users understood that the video did not mention Wagner, but instead expressed anger at the U.S. or called the footage fake.

Another video claiming to depict the mercenary attack and subsequent retaliation was familiar to @DFRLab. Since at least February 11, the same video footage has circulated on YouTube and in articles on Russian losses in Syria. The footage is from a video game, but, in this instance of its deployment, it was purported to depict U.S. gunships engaging Russian mercenaries in Syria.

Some might recall seeing this video imagery in the past, when the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed the very same footage was the Russian military striking an ISIS convoy. President Vladimir Putin also showed the same footage to filmmaker Oliver Stone. Again, this footage originated from a video game.

However, in the case of U.S. retaliation against Wagner, the video game footage has been one of the most successful pieces of intentionally misleading information so far. The video was even shared by the widow of killed Wagner fighter Stanislav Matveev, who was featured at the end of this report. In an interview with the publication Znak, she showed the footage on her phone; the journalist was either ignorant to the fake or intentionally misleading the audience.

Translation: Last fight of PMC Wagner’s 5th Company. (Source: YouTube / Znak Znak)

A side-by-side comparison between the original video and the one shown in the interview matched with certainty.