Hacked Records Show 400,000 Russians Killed in Ukraine War

Russia has seen the deaths of about 400,000 of its own people fighting in Ukraine since the full-scale invasion nearly five years ago, according to confidential data available to the country’s statistics office, Rosstat.

The information comes from more than 11 million death certificates with accompanying details such as residence, age and where people died. The data was obtained by the Belarusian pro-opposition group Cyber Partisans and the Ukrainian hacking operation Silent Crow. It was subsequently shared with Bloomberg News and a small group of other outlets.

Between 24 February 2022 and the end of August 2026, nearly 392,700 death certificates in the data explicitly link fatalities to war, either through coding or free-form text fields listing terms such as “military operation”, “striking” or “drones”.

President Vladimir Putin has gone to great lengths not to acknowledge the extent of Russian casualties in Ukraine. Already in 2015, he called military losses incurred “in peacetime during special operations” or during war a state secret. Russia has not provided any casualty figures since the first months of the invasion.

The data set almost certainly understates the total killed due to difficulties in recording combat casualties. Some people will be reported missing, some bodies will be unidentified, and others may die months later from war-related injuries not specifically listed in the records. Other deaths may be recorded in unrelated categories or not at all.

Silent Crow’s own calculations put the number at about 450,000, in part because they also include fatalities and unexplained combat-related entries. Rosstat did not respond to a request for comment.

The material provides a rare insight into the true cost of the war to Russia, as Rosstat gradually stopped publishing many statistics after the 2022 invasion.

It shows how the body count rose dramatically after the first months of the war, as Russian forces were held back in eastern Ukraine and Kiev’s defense operations became increasingly effective.

Separate reports suggest that the fighting has been even tougher for the Russians this year, with less territorial gains than in 2025 and rising casualties. The Kremlin lost a record 54,000 troops either killed or seriously wounded in October, according to Ukrainian and Western intelligence agencies.

On the Ukrainian side, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told French media in February that at least 55,000 of his soldiers had died in the war and a large number were missing.

With no significant gains on the battlefield this year, Russia has shifted tactics to massive bombing of Ukrainian cities and critical infrastructure to break Kyiv’s morale. At the same time, the Kremlin is trying to convince the US to force Ukraine to give up more territory to end the war. Russian, Ukrainian and US officials are due to meet in Abu Dhabi this week to discuss the parameters of a potential ceasefire.

Silent Crow and Cyber Partisans said on November 1 that they breached Rosstat’s internal infrastructure, gaining access to about 25,000 computers and mining about 23 terabytes of data, including information on Russian military casualties.

Rosstat said a few days later that it had detected targeted cyber attacks on its systems between October 29 and November 1, but found no evidence that its databases had been compromised or that confidential information had been leaked. The agency said it was restoring systems after the attack took parts of its infrastructure offline.

The estimate of about 400,000 Russian war casualties is realistic, according to people familiar with the situation in the Russian military, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media. The number is also in line with estimates by a tracking project run by independent Russian portal Mediazona and the BBC Russian service, which identified 285,881 nominal deaths as of this month.

A separate estimate by Mediazona and Meduza, based on a Russian register of wills that excludes all combatants from occupied Ukraine, puts the death toll at around 352,000 by December 2025. According to the Ukrainian General Staff, Russia has suffered 1.6 million dead and seriously injured since the start of the war.

Almost 37,800 military deaths have been recorded so far in 2026, but this is almost certainly an underestimate due to the sometimes months-long delay before deaths are registered. More than half of those deaths have occurred in eastern Ukraine, where Russian forces are trying to break through some of the country’s strongest defensive fortifications.

With monthly casualties often exceeding recruitment levels and Russian troops not advancing on the ground, Moscow may soon have to mobilize more aggressively.

The Kremlin has built a digital infrastructure for conscripting people into the military, closing off potential escape routes for those who don’t want to fight. Since the 2022 Partial Mobilization Decree was never formally repealed, the authorities could still call up additional reservists without declaring a new mobilization.

Russia has introduced sign-up bonuses and other benefits to encourage people to join the military, although some payments are being cut due to growing pressure on the country’s finances.

Statistics reviewed by Bloomberg, which run from 2021 to the end of August 2026, show a growing toll of the war on Russian companies.

They illustrate how the relatively young army that invaded Ukraine began to draw on older and older sections of Russian society, and how poorer, more remote and ethnically diverse regions bore the brunt of the dead, while those in major cities could be somewhat protected.

How destinies collapse

In the first half of 2022, only 146 men aged 50 to 59 died of war-related causes, less than 1% of all deaths in this cohort. In the first six months of 2025, this number increased to more than 12,600, accounting for more than 16% of Russian male deaths in this age group. For men aged 18 to 29, the war accounted for roughly two-thirds of all deaths during the same period.

In remote Siberian regions such as the republics of Buryatia, Tuva, and Zabaikalsky Krai, all of which border Mongolia, approximately one-third of men aged 18 to 49 who died between the start of the invasion and mid-2024 were recorded as war-related. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, it was about every 10th.

While the authenticity of the database could not be independently and cryptographically proven, Bloomberg’s review found that the metadata was consistent with the actual data export and found no signs of fabrication.

The leak was also in line with previously published official government data on deaths from 2021 to 2023, the last year Rosstat published the final annual statistics. Bloomberg found a 0.1% and 0.2% difference between the total death figures from the leaked database and the official Rosstat data in 2021 and 2022, respectively.

The biggest difference was in 2023, when the number of deaths in the leaked files was about 1% higher than the number of deaths reported by Rosstat. Thousands of dead young men appear to be missing from official statistics that year, probably in part because war deaths can take months to record.

Since the beginning of the war, the registration of military deaths has been taking longer and longer. The median time lag was about six weeks in the second half of 2023 and jumped to more than four months in 2025. In August 2026 alone, more than 2,500 war-related deaths appeared in the database, even though they occurred in 2025.

In 2024, the most recent year with substantially complete data, about one in 10 war-related deaths were recorded more than 14 months later, while most non-military deaths were registered within a week.

From mid-2024, records become more patchy, with nearly half of war deaths in this period missing a home region, compared to about one in 20 for other deaths.

With help from Alex Newman.

This article was generated from an automated news agency source without text modification.