Daniel Wolfram
Official records from Rosstat, Russia’s state statistics agency, link 412,576 death certificates directly to military operations in Ukraine.
Over 400,000 Russian troops have died fighting in Ukraine, according to leaked state files reviewed by The Guardian.
The records come from Rosstat, Russia’s official statistics agency.
Inside a cache of 11 million death certificates, researchers found 412,576 entries directly tied to military operations.
New information about Russian casualties
Two hacker groups, the Belarus-linked Cyber Partisans and Ukraine’s Silent Crow, obtained the database and shared it with reporters. Rosstat confirmed the cyberattack.
The agency has continued to deny that hackers stole any sensitive information.
Russia has treated its military death toll as a state secret since the early days of the war. That forced the public to rely on guesswork. This leak provides the clearest look yet at the massive scale of Russian battlefield deaths.
Data looks authentic
Independent researchers say the records look solid. “The data looks authentic, and it’s very rich,” said Janis Kluge, an analyst at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. He called it “the biggest leak of data when it comes to Russian casualties.”
Death certificates take roughly six months to process, and thousands of missing soldiers are never counted. As Kluge put it: “We are probably at this time closer to 500,000 killed Russian soldiers than 400,000.”
Other estimates tell a similar story. British intelligence calculated in September that about 500,000 Russian troops had died. Separately, the independent Russian outlet Mediazona has verified nearly 286,000 dead service members by name using obituaries and cemetery records.
Russian casualties in the poorest states
The leaked files also show that Russia’s poorest regions have suffered the most.
In remote eastern areas like Buryatia and Tuva, combat accounted for roughly a third of all deaths among working-age men. In Moscow and St Petersburg, that number was just 10 percent.
During a period from late 2024 to 2025, battlefield fatalities regularly surpassed 15,000 every month, leaving roughly 500 soldiers dead every single day.
