From Varys to Elon Musk and Ryan Gosling. Forged obituaries and mistakes we found while working on our Russian army losses database

How we killed Varys

Initially, our casualty count was supposed to be a small-scale project; we kept releasing summary reports but kept the database non-public. However, as the count grew, we faced the demand for the named records and eventually, last year, released the public database. The effort to make it public exposed a major logistical gap in our work: initially, photographs of the KIA soldiers were not a mandatory field for our team. Suddenly, we found ourselves with tens of thousands of records where an obituary contained a picture we had failed to collect.

The only viable solution was automated parsing. We revisited all our sources, deploying an AI model called InsightFace with the simplest task: detect a human face and determine its gender. Then came the manual review of thousands of low-confidence images and duplicates. Often, a photo of a local mayor or district head presenting a posthumous medal to a grieving family would be erroneously scraped and linked to multiple different casualties. We weeded out hundreds of these ubiquitous officials, though the odd bureaucrat still slips through.

It was this automated scraping that caught Varys, the Master of Whisperers from HBO’s Game of Thrones. The algorithm pulled an image of the fictional eunuch from “Goryushko”, a Telegram channel that aggregates war obituaries; we completely missed the fact that the channel’s administrators had posted the photo as a dark joke playing on the deceased soldier’s first name.

The casualty was entirely real. On a local community page for the city of Zlatoust, we found images from a farewell ceremony showing the headstone of one Varys Galimyanovich Kasimov. Though the grave bore no portrait, we eventually tracked down his sole surviving photograph on the Russian social network Odnoklassniki.

Prompted by reader reports flagging the GoT Varys’ photo, we dug deeper into the real Varys’s fate. He was not a standard volunteer, as initially reported, but an inmate recruited from prison; in 2021, he had been jailed for the murder of his drinking companion.

Varys is our most recent anomaly. Over the past year, we have corrected dozens of similar misfires. Often, the error lies in the algorithm’s erratic cropping: it will sometimes lock onto the nearest face-like object, such as a dog’s face, a religious icon, or even a toy left on a grave.

Fake news

It is not just automated errors that we have to deal with: malicious actors frequently submit elaborate fakes designed to test—and defeat—our vetting process.

The simplest way is to just invent a character. In 2023, a post originating from the Bryansk region reported the death of a supposed writer named “Oleg Byldaev” from the town of Dyatkovo. The brief tribute described him as a “decent and good man” who had been killed in action. The photo attached, however, was of Varg Vikernes, the notorious Norwegian-French black metal musician behind the project Burzum.

Another post on the Russian social network VK mourned the loss of a “Junior Lieutenant Rodion Timofeevich Goslov”, who operated under the call sign “Runner”.

The post described a dramatic act of supposed heroism, claiming the lieutenant had noticed Ukrainian militants approaching residential buildings near Korenevo. “Realising the potential tragedy, he loaded his service vehicle with explosives and drove full speed into the enemy unit,” the obituary read. The accompanying photo was a heavily edited image of the actor Ryan Gosling, whose face had been—quite seamlessly—photoshopped onto the headshot of a balding FSB officer.

A similarly forged obituary announced the death of “Captain Timofey Eduardovich Khardin,” who was supposedly killed in battle whilst “covering his comrades”. The creators went so far as to include precise dates of life—September 15, 1977 to June 16, 2022—which conveniently matched the actual date of birth of the British actor Tom Hardy. The accompanying image was a cinematic still from the 2015 mystery thriller Child 44, in which Hardy played a Soviet military officer.

Other fabrications rely on much cruder photo editing.

One obituary mourned an “Ilya Moskovtsev,” featuring an image that was unmistakably the tech mogul Elon Musk, clumsily photoshopped into a standard Russian military portrait, while praising “the best father, husband and warrior”.

Finally, one particularly elaborate post mourned the loss of a marine named Pavel Frantsigin, operating under the call sign “Batya” (Pops), who was purportedly killed in Ukraine in January 2025. The obituary, with Pope Francis’ edited image attached, leaned heavily into sentimental wartime tropes.

“He did not get the nickname Batya by accident,” the tribute read, painting him as a protective figure who “treated the guys like his own children”. The text went on to describe a deeply religious patriot who carried an icon to the front lines and lived by the maxim of serving “not only people, but also God and Homeland.” It declared that “he lived quietly, according to his conscience, and left in the same way—modestly, giving everything he could.”