Misleading: Photo shows a captured Russian soldier, not a North Korean deserter
On Oct. 16, a post on X claimed that a North Korean soldier fighting for Russia had defected to the Ukrainian side, with a photo purportedly showing the deserter.
“One of the 18 North Korean soldiers who escaped from the Russian position has recently arrived at the Ukrainian position!” the Chinese-language post partly said.
Ukrainian, U.S. and South Korean officials said since mid-October that North Korea has deployed its troops to help Russia in its war against Ukraine. In early November, the Ukrainian defense minister said their troops engaged with North Korean units for the first time.
The same image was also shared alongside a similar claim in Chinese (here, here, here and here), as well as in Japanese and Korean.
Altogether, these posts garnered almost 4,000 likes, over 500 comments and around 500 shares.
However, the claim is misleading. This particular photo has been circulating since at least 2022 when the Russian-Ukrainian war started.
Man’s identity
The man featured in the photo is a Russian soldier from Buryatia, a region of Russia bordering Mongolia.
A reverse image search on Yandex found an identical image posted on the Russian social media platform VK on March 21, 2022, by a Buryatia online media. The Russian-language caption reads: “Another captured Buryat in Ukraine.”
Further search on Yandex led to a video posted on YouTube multiple times in 2022. One was dated March 26, and the other was dated April 2. The clip features a man in a combat uniform who looks like the man in the photo.
The April 2022 YouTube video’s uploader included the Russian name “Чингиз Дамбаев” in the title.
With the help of Zhang Jingyao, an undergraduate student majoring in Russian at the Communication University of China, and also her instructor, Annie Lab learned that the name can be written as “Chingis Dambaev” in the Roman alphabet.
Using this name, we found two media reports about his capture.
Babel, a Ukrainian online media covering the war, and the Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR), a London-based nonprofit organization, both reported about a trial of Russian sniper Chingiz Dambaev, also known as Chingiz Dambaev Tumunovich, in early 2023.
Both news reports included his interview video with Ukrainian journalist Dmytro Karpenko. The IWPR article also featured a screen capture from the 44-minute, 24-second footage.
On March 30, 2023, the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine issued a press release on the conviction of a Russian soldier with a blurred photograph of Dambaev.
According to the reports, Dambaev was sentenced to 12 years in absentia after he was found guilty of “of violating the laws and customs of war.”
Ukrainian prosecutors accused Dambaev of attacking and attempting to shoot a civilian near the Ukrainian village of Buzova on March 8, 2022, while he was under the influence of alcohol.
In an interview with Karpenko, the Russian sniper said he was stationed and lived in Ulan-Ude, in Buryatia, eastern Russia, near the border with Mongolia.
Dambaev was included in a prisoner swap in April 2022, according to the IWPR article, and was, therefore, absent from the court hearing in 2023.
