Russia may have lost between 394,000 and 450,000 people fighting in its war against Ukraine since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, according to confidential death records that two hacker groups say they obtained from Russia’s own statistics agency.
The figures are based on more than 11 million death certificates that the Belarusian pro-opposition group Cyber Partisans and the Ukrainian hacker operation Silent Crow say they extracted from the internal Demography database of Rosstat, Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service. The records cover deaths registered between February 2022 and August 2026. The groups published their findings on 7 November and shared the data with Bloomberg News and a small group of other media organisations.
The two groups reached different totals because they used different methods. Cyber Partisans counted at least 393,881 deaths in records that explicitly attributed the fatality to military operations. Silent Crow put the figure at as many as 450,100, using a broader method that also included non-combat deaths among military personnel and cases where the cause of death was not specified. According to the data shared with Bloomberg, nearly 392,700 death certificates recorded between 24 February 2022 and late August 2026 explicitly linked the fatalities to the war.
The records have not been independently verified, and the figures should be treated with caution. Bloomberg said it was not possible to independently and cryptographically prove the authenticity of the database, but its review found that the metadata was consistent with a genuine data export and found no indicators of fabrication. Its checks found only a 0.1 percent and 0.2 percent difference between total death figures in the leaked database and Rosstat’s official figures for 2021 and 2022.
Rosstat acknowledged that its systems faced cyberattacks between 29 October and 1 November, but denied that its databases had been compromised or that information had been leaked.
Russia has not publicly disclosed its military casualty figures from the war. Independent Russian outlet Mediazona, working with BBC Russian and volunteers, had identified 285,881 Russian military personnel killed in Ukraine through open-source research as of 6 November, and has cautioned that its verified count is incomplete and the actual number is likely to be substantially higher.
Estimates based on data from Ukrainian open-source mapping project DeepState indicate Moscow has gained control of approximately 73,000 square kilometres of Ukrainian territory since the invasion began. Using Silent Crow’s upper estimate of 450,100 deaths, that would imply roughly six deaths for every square kilometre captured — though the casualty figures remain independently unverified.
The estimates have emerged ahead of another round of negotiations involving Russia, Ukraine and the United States, scheduled for Tuesday in Abu Dhabi.
Source: Bloomberg News, via The Economic Times
