Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
Moscow has not released an official casualty figure for its war in Ukraine since September 2022, but the leaked data matches and independent analysis from July.
What the Kremlin will not confirm, a cyberattack has apparently extracted from inside Russia’s own numbers.
Two hacker groups, Belarusian Cyber Partisans and Silent Crow, say they pulled death records from Rosstat, Russia’s federal statistics agency, and the file points to between 394,000 and 450,000 war-related deaths on the Russian side since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, the Kyiv Independent reported.
The two groups worked from Rosstat’s internal Demography database, which covers death certificates registered between February 2022 and August 2026. Cyber Partisans counted 393,881 deaths it could tie explicitly to the military operation, while Silent Crow, using a broader methodology, reached 450,100.
On that scale, the war is now the fourth most common cause of death in Russia since 2022, according to the leaked figures. Annual war-related deaths climbed from roughly 19,000 in 2022 to more than 182,000 in 2025, with most of the dead aged between 30 and 49, Kyiv Post reported.
A breach Rosstat admits only in part
The intrusion ran from October 29 to November 1, 2026. The attackers claim they pulled around 23 terabytes of material from some 25,000 computers across Rosstat’s central office, its regional branches and its Main Interregional Center for Processing and Dissemination of Statistical Information, Reform.news reported.
Rosstat has acknowledged being hit by a coordinated cyberattack in that window but denies that its protected databases were compromised or that any sensitive data was leaked.
The leaked file sweeps up civilians killed in airstrikes and during Ukraine’s 2024 Kursk incursion alongside soldiers, but excludes troops listed as missing in action and some 27,000 foreign fighters recruited into the Russian armed forces.
How the numbers compare
Independent outlet Mediazona, working with BBC Russian and a network of volunteers, has so far named 285,881 Russian military dead in its running “Counting the Dead” ledger as of November 6, 2026, the Kyiv Independent noted in its report on the leak. Researchers behind that project have long argued their list captures only a share of the true total.
In a July report titled Russian Blood and Treasure: The Ballooning Costs of Putin’s War, the Center for Strategic & International Studies wrote that Russia had suffered as many as 450,000 deaths on the battlefield during the war up to the release of the report.
Janis Kluge, a Russia specialist at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told The Moscow Times the leak was “the most significant leak of data when it comes to Russian casualties,” adding that “the war has never been more deadly than it is right now.”
He also said the losses amount to roughly half a percent of Russia’s working-age population, a scale he judged politically damaging but not yet economically disruptive.
