Were 300,000 Ukrainian soldiers and 40,000 civilians killed in the Russian war against Ukraine, as this video with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims? No, that's not true: The cited numbers of military casualties and civilian deaths are not supported by evidence, as analyzed in detail by the Washington Post, and quantifying the toll of the war in Ukraine still remains an elusive task.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) on TikTok where it was published by @imrichkraj on May 10, 2023, with the caption: "What we're doing to Ukraine is bad for the Ukrainian people. We killed 300,000 AFU soldiers and 40,000 civilians, said the U.S. presidential candidate Kennedy". (Translated from Slovak by Lead Stories staff).
The audio is in English. The video opened:
The U.S. government and the Ukrainian government have worked hard to hide the number of casualties, which have been catastrophic.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed May 24 13:23:45 2023 UTC)
The claim has also appeared in an English version.
The Slovak TikTok video is re-sharing a clip of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine activist and environmental lawyer who in April 2023 launched his bid for the 2024 democratic presidential nomination, taken from a recent interview on All-In Podcast, episode 127 (from the 07:03 mark). The Slovak caption in the TikTok, which is supposed to be a short description of what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is saying, is misleading as it states that on top of 300,000 soldiers, Ukraine has also lost 40,000 civilians: Kennedy Jr. does not say that in the original interview that the TikTok reproposed.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had talked about 14,000 - not 40,000 - Ukrainian civilians on the Tucker Carlson Tonight show aired on April, 19, 2023, on Fox News (at the 4:39 mark). Not only the casualty figure cited is unsupported by evidence, but neither is the 7/1 or 8/1 ratio by which the Ukrainian forces would allegedly be killed in comparison to casualties on the Russian side, given by Kennedy Jr. on Tucker Carlson Tonight and reported also in the TikTok video. Kennedy cites the leaked Pentagon documents for these numbers, however, such data don't show up in either version ("original" or doctored) of the leaked documents.
