Hacked records show 400,000 Russians killed in war on Ukraine

Russia has recorded the deaths of about 400,000 of its people fighting in Ukraine since the full-scale invasion almost five years ago, according to confidential data held by the country’s statistics agency, 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 hacker operation Silent Crow. It was subsequently shared with Bloomberg News and a small group of other outlets.Between Feb 24, 2022, and late August 2026, almost 392,700 death certificates in the data explicitly link the fatalities to the war, either via coding or freeform text fields mentioning terms such as “military operation,” “shelling” or “drones.”President Vladimir Putin has gone to great lengths to avoid acknowledging the scale of Russian fatalities in Ukraine.As far back as 2015, he made military losses incurred “in peacetime during special operations” or during war a state secret. Russia hasn’t provided any figures on casualties since the early months of the invasion.The data set almost certainly understates the total number killed because of the difficulties of recording combat fatalities.Some people will have been reported missing, some bodies will have been unidentified and others may have died months later from war-related injuries that are not explicitly set out in the records. Other deaths may be recorded under unrelated categories or not at all. Silent Crow’s own calculations put the figure at about 450,000, in part because they also include non-combat related fatalities and records without an explicit cause. Rosstat didn’t respond to a request for comment.The material provides a rare insight into the true cost of the war for Russia, since Rosstat gradually stopped publishing many statistics following the 2022 invasion. It shows how the body count grew dramatically after the early months of the war as Russian forces were held up in eastern Ukraine and Kyiv’s defensive operations became increasingly effective. Separate reporting suggests the fighting has been even tougher for the Russians in 2026, with fewer territorial advances than in 2025 and increasing numbers of casualties.The Kremlin lost a record 54,000 troops in October, either killed or seriously wounded, according to Ukraine and western intelligence agencies. On the Ukrainian side, President Volodymyr Zelensky told French media in February that at least 55,000 of his soldiers had been killed in the war and a large number of people are missing.With no significant gains on the battlefield this year, Russia has shifted tactics to heavily bombing Ukrainian cities and critical infrastructure with the aim of breaking Kyiv’s morale.At the same time, the Kremlin has been trying to persuade the US to force Ukraine to give up additional territory in order to end the war.Officials from Russia, Ukraine and the US are due to meet in Abu Dhabi this week to discuss the parameters of a potential ceasefire. Silent Crow and Cyber Partisans said on Nov 1 that they’d breached Rosstat’s internal infrastructure, gaining access to about 25,000 computers and extracting some 23 terabytes of data, including information on Russian military losses. Rosstat said days later that it had detected targeted cyberattacks on its systems between Oct 29 and Nov 1, but that it found no evidence its databases had been compromised or confidential information leaked. The agency said it was restoring systems after an attack knocked parts of its infrastructure offline.An estimate of about 400,000 Russian war deaths is realistic, according to people familiar with the situation in the Russian military, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorised to speak to the media.The figure is also in line with estimates from a tracking project run by the independent Russian outlet Mediazona and the BBC Russian service, which identified 285,881 deaths by name as of November 2026. A separate estimate by Mediazona and Meduza, based on Russia’s probate registry which excludes any combatants from occupied Ukraine, puts the death figure at about 352,000 through December 2025.According to Ukraine’s General Staff, Russia has suffered 1.6 million deaths and serious injuries since the beginning of the war. Kremlin recruitmentSo far in 2026, nearly 37,800 military deaths have been recorded, but that’s almost certainly an underestimate because of the sometimes months-long lag before deaths are registered. More than half of those deaths occurred in eastern Ukraine where Russian forces have been struggling to break through some of the country’s strongest defensive fortifications.With monthly losses often exceeding recruitment levels and Russian troops not advancing on the ground, Moscow may soon have to mobilise more aggressively.The Kremlin has built the digital infrastructure to summon people to the army and has closed off potential escape routes for those who don’t want to fight.Given that the 2022 decree on partial mobilisation has never been formally revoked, the authorities could still call up additional reservists without announcing a new mobilisation.Russia has introduced sign-up bonuses and other benefits to incentivise people to join the military, though some payments are being cut due to the growing pressure on the country’s finances. The statistics reviewed by Bloomberg, which run from 2021 to late August 2026, show the war’s growing toll on Russian society. They illustrate how the relatively youthful army that invaded Ukraine has come to draw on older and older sections of Russian society and how poorer, more remote and ethnically diverse regions have borne a heavier share of deaths, while those in the major cities may have been shielded to an extent. How the fatalities break downIn the first half of 2022, only 146 men between the ages of 50 and 59 died of war-related causes, less than 1% of all deaths for that cohort. In the first six months of 2025, that number rose to more than 12,600 and constituted more than 16% of deaths for Russian men in that age bracket. For men aged 18 to 29, the war was responsible for about two-thirds of all deaths in the same period.In remote Siberian regions such as the republics of Buryatia, Tuva and Zabaykalsky Krai, which all border Mongolia, about 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 one in 10. While it was not possible to independently and cryptographically prove the authenticity of the database, Bloomberg’s review found that the metadata was consistent with a genuine data export, and did not find indicators of fabrication.The leak was also consistent with previously published official government death data from 2021 to 2023, the last year Rosstat published final annual statistics. Bloomberg found a 0.1% and 0.2% difference between total deaths figures from the leaked database and Rosstat’s official figures 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 young men’s deaths appear to be missing from the year’s official statistics, likely in part because war deaths can take months to be recorded.Since the war started, military deaths are taking longer and longer to register. 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 deaths related to the war appeared in the database even though they occurred in 2025.In 2024, the last 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 onward, the records become patchier, with nearly half of war deaths in that period missing a home region, compared with about one in 20 for other deaths. BLOOMBERG