Leaked Rosstat Records Point to Up to 450,000 Russian War Dead

Death records that two hacker groups say they stole from Russia’s statistics agency point to as many as 450,100 war-related deaths since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 — a toll far higher than anything the Kremlin has ever acknowledged, and one that has not yet been independently verified.

The figures were published on 7 November by the Belarusian Cyber Partisans and the pro-Ukrainian group Silent Crow, who say they spent months inside the network of Rosstat, Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service, before wiping its servers in a cyberattack between 29 October and 1 November. Bloomberg News examined the leaked database and published its own analysis on 8 November, and The Moscow Times and other outlets have since reported on the material.

Two counts from the same records

The two groups reached different totals because they counted differently. The Cyber Partisans put the toll at at least 393,881, counting only records that explicitly attribute a death to military operations. Silent Crow cast a wider net, reaching 450,100 by also including non-combat deaths among military personnel, civilians killed in strikes and during Ukraine’s 2024 incursion into the Kursk region, and cases where the cause of death was left unspecified.

Bloomberg’s review of the database found about 392,700 death certificates explicitly linked to the war between 24 February 2022 and late August 2026, drawn from a trove of more than 11 million certificates. Of Silent Crow’s total, 356,056 certificates carry the ICD-10 code Y36 for “operations of war”, 38,229 carry combat wording or the code Y89.1, and 18,291 are combat deaths with no code at all.

By the groups’ account, the annual toll rose sharply as the war dragged on, from about 19,000 war-related deaths in 2022 to more than 182,000 in 2025, according to a summary of the data by the Kyiv Post. The Moscow Times reported that 72 per cent of the registered deaths occurred in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic.

How the data was obtained

The groups say they were inside Rosstat’s network for about six months before the attack, and that they extracted around 23 terabytes of data, including internal documents and demographic and economic statistics as well as the death records. Rosstat has confirmed that its systems came under cyberattack between 29 October and 1 November, but denies that any databases were compromised or that protected information leaked. The agency later reported disruption to some services and extended deadlines for submitting statistics.

Both groups are banned in Russia as “extremist organisations”. They shared the data with Bloomberg and a small group of other media organisations, and bne IntelliNews has published its own analysis of the figures.

Why the figures cannot yet be verified

Every figure in the leak rests, for now, on the hackers’ own claims. Bloomberg said it could not authenticate the database by cryptographic means, but found no evidence of fabrication: the technical metadata was consistent with a genuine export, and the totals matched Rosstat’s own published death figures for 2021 and 2022 to within 0.1 and 0.2 per cent.

The Moscow Times cross-checked a random sample of 50 names from the leaked dataset against the open-source register of Russian war dead kept by Mediazona and BBC Russian, but said it could not verify the data in full. Meduza and Mediazona said they had obtained the published data and begun checking it.

There are also gaps the records themselves cannot fill. The database counts only deaths that were formally registered, and registration has grown slower as the war has gone on: by Silent Crow’s estimate, only about a quarter of deaths reach the database within a month, and 69 per cent within six months. The 39,296 deaths logged for 2026, up to 28 August, are therefore far from complete. The figures also exclude soldiers listed as missing and roughly 27,000 foreign fighters believed to have been recruited into the Russian armed forces.

What independent counts show

Independent tallies point in the same direction, though at lower totals. Mediazona and BBC Russian, who identify the dead by name from obituaries, cemeteries and other open sources, had confirmed 285,881 Russian military personnel killed as of 6 November — a count both outlets describe as incomplete. A joint study by Meduza and Mediazona based on inheritance records estimated roughly 350,000 fallen Russian servicemen by the end of 2025.

Britain’s defence ministry said in early September that more than half a million people had died fighting for Russia, with total casualties, including the wounded, possibly as high as 1.5 million.

Russia has not published official figures for its military losses since September 2022, and from 2024 Rosstat stopped publishing annual data on causes of death, making independent assessment far harder. On the leaked figures, the war would be the fourth most common cause of death in Russia since 2022, behind only chronic ischaemic heart disease, Covid-19 and other cerebrovascular diseases — and Russia’s deadliest conflict since the Second World War, far exceeding the roughly 13,000 Soviet troops killed in the nine-year war in Afghanistan.

Janis Kluge, head of the Russia and Eurasia division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, called it “the most significant leak of data when it comes to Russian casualties”.

What happens next

The leak lands as diplomacy around the war gathers pace. The United States is due to mediate a new round of talks in Abu Dhabi on 10 and 11 November, the first trilateral negotiations since February, with security guarantees at the centre of the agenda.

Meanwhile the fighting continues. Earlier this month, a Russian strike on an aid centre in Komyshuvakha killed at least 31 people, according to Ukrainian officials — a reminder that the civilian toll keeps rising alongside the military one.

Whether the leaked records stand up to scrutiny will become clearer in the coming weeks, as Meduza, Mediazona and other outlets work through the data. For now, they offer the first glimpse of a toll drawn from the Russian state’s own registers — and a measure of how far it sits from anything Moscow has been willing to say in public.