Russia may have lost up to 450,000 people in Ukraine war, leaked death records suggest

Russia may have suffered between 394,000 and 450,000 deaths among people fighting on its side in Ukraine since launching its full-scale invasion in February 2022, according to confidential records allegedly obtained from the country's Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) by two hacker groups.

The estimates are based on more than 11 million death certificates containing details such as the deceased person's age, place of residence and location of death. The records, reportedly extracted from Rosstat's internal Demography database, cover deaths registered between February 2022 and August 2026.

Belarusian pro-opposition group Cyber Partisans and Ukrainian hacker operation Silent Crow claimed responsibility for accessing the database and released their findings on November 7. The data was subsequently shared with Bloomberg News and a small group of other media organisations.


Cyber Partisans identified at least 393,881 deaths in records that explicitly attributed fatalities to military operations. Silent Crow estimated the toll at as many as 450,100, using a broader methodology that also included non-combat deaths among military personnel and certain cases where the cause of death was not specified.

The Kyiv Independent said it could not immediately independently verify the authenticity of the leaked records or the casualty estimates.

According to the data shared with Bloomberg, nearly 392,700 death certificates recorded between February 24, 2022, and late August 2026 explicitly linked the fatalities to the war.

The hackers said they had gained access to Rosstat's network around six months before the operation became public. They claimed to have collected internal documents and other information before targeting the agency's IT infrastructure overnight between October 31 and November 1.

Rosstat acknowledged that its systems had faced cyberattacks between October 29 and November 1 but denied that its databases had been compromised or that information had been leaked. The agency subsequently reported disruptions to some services and extended deadlines for submitting certain statistical data.

Russia has not publicly disclosed its military casualty figures from the war, making it difficult to establish the actual death toll.

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 November 6. The organisations have cautioned that their verified count is incomplete and that the actual number of deaths is likely to be substantially higher.

The scale of Russia's losses can also be viewed against its territorial gains. Estimates based on data from Ukrainian open-source mapping project DeepState indicate that Moscow has gained control of approximately 73,000 square kilometres of Ukrainian territory since the invasion began in February 2022. Using Silent Crow's upper estimate of 450,100 deaths would imply roughly six deaths for every square kilometre captured. However, 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, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

The meeting would mark the fourth round of talks brokered by the Trump administration, following the previous meeting in Geneva in February. Western governments backing the diplomatic initiative are seeking a way to break the deadlock, but disagreements over territorial control and security arrangements remain unresolved.

With inputs from agencies