More than 450,000 fighters on the Russian side have died since the start of the war, according to official database

More than 450,000 Russian military personnel have been killed since February 2022, when the Kremlin launched its war against Ukraine, according to a database obtained through a hack of Russia’s state statistics agency, Rosstat. The database is based on death certificates, and its figures are consistent with other publicly available sources, although they do not provide a complete picture. The records include at least one Spaniard and dozens of Latin Americans who have died while serving in the Russian armed forces.The data cover the period from the start of the war through August 28 of this year. The total would therefore also need to include those listed as missing and those whose death certificates are still being processed. However, not all the deaths in the database are related to the invasion of Ukraine, nor are all of them confirmed in forensic reports.The database was leaked last weekend and verified by EL PAÍS, news organizations including Bloomberg, Mediazona and Meduza, and independent experts such as Janis Kluge. The death certificate data have been cross-checked against other open sources, including court records, and there is no indication that they have been falsified or artificially inflated.It is the first publicly available database of Russian military deaths to emerge, albeit a partial one. Until now, figures on fatalities have come from journalistic investigations. The British public broadcaster, the BBC, and the Russian outlet Mediazona, for example, have been compiling a list of combatants killed since the war began. They had identified 285,881 deaths through open sources, but estimated — based on an analysis of inheritance records in Russia — that the total had exceeded 350,000 by the end of 2025.“It’s not the number [of fatalities] that is new, it’s the potential validation of other methods and the direct source that makes this leak special,” military analyst Janis Kluge posted on X. “I cross-checked with identifiers from a few Russian court records, and the people in the court documents show up in the database. It’s unlikely this is fake data, however this doesn’t confirm the sums are true.”“These deaths are only those officially registered in Russian civil registry offices,” said the two hacker groups that stole the information, Kiberpartizany BY and Silent Crow, which are aligned with the Belarusian opposition and pro-Ukraine, respectively, and focus on attacking Russian networks. Their operations include disabling the systems of Russia’s flag carrier, Aeroflot, last year.According to the data, at least 356,056 people died in “combat operations” (code Y36); 56,520 in military actions for which no further details were given (code Y89.1); 575 in “terrorist acts”; 13,671 died in occupied territory with no cause specified; and 14,160 from external causes that may have been linked to the war, such as traffic accidents, illnesses and suicides. A further 9,118 deaths have no explanation at all.For comparison, the United States suffered around 405,000 military deaths in World War II. For Russia, the invasion of Ukraine is the deadliest war it has fought in the past eight decades: 15,051 Soviet soldiers died during the occupation of Afghanistan (1979–1989), while Russia lost between 10,000 troops, according to official sources, and 25,000, according to the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, in the two Chechen wars (1994–1996 and 1999–2009). Those figures are far below the total now revealed.The hacked Russian database does not include missing personnel — around 280,000 people on both the Russian and Ukrainian sides combined, according to Red Cross sources — or the wounded, whose numbers are several times higher than those of the dead. The records also show other civilian deaths in occupied territories, many of which were either unexplained or attributed to illness and other natural causes.Ukraine has not released official figures for the number of its troops killed in the nearly five years of war, although it has provided figures for those missing (around 90,000). The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), however, estimates that between 125,000 and 150,000 Ukrainians have been killed in the war.Foreign fightersThe Russian database includes one Spanish citizen who was killed fighting on the Russian side. EL PAÍS has independently verified his death. The 29-year-old was killed in October 2024 during the battle for Kostiantynivka, in an explosion (code Y36.2 in his Rosstat record). Fighting over this part of the Donetsk region is still ongoing.On the other side of the front, at least 10 Spaniards have been killed fighting in the Ukrainian trenches, according to reports published by various media outlets, although there is no official count of those killed in action.Latin America accounts for nearly 200 deaths on the Russian side, although this figure cannot be verified using the hacked database, which gives a total for each nationality but does not provide access to all individual records. Bloomberg has identified around 11,000 foreign nationals from 100 countries fighting for Russia. More than 6,000 of them also held Russian citizenship, and 80% came from countries that were once part of the Soviet Union.The leaked file also omits other cases confirmed by separate sources. Uruguay, for example, does not appear in the database, but the country has lost at least one citizen who signed a contract with Russia’s Defense Ministry. His name was Matías Ignacio Amaro Silva. He was 36 and the father of a young daughter. Amaro Silva had seen an online advertisement for a job as a cook in the invading army; however, he was sent to the front as a combatant, his family told the Uruguayan press. After losing contact with him on April 11 this year, his relatives learned of his death from another member of his unit.The internet is awash with advertisements inviting people to sign contracts with the Russian army. The channels carrying them also use images of young Russian women — sometimes AI-generated — as bait to lure men who will discover that the only thing waiting for them is war.For months, the Kremlin has also been seeking to incentivize “recruiters” by offering them commissions for every new recruit they bring into the army. This has led many pro-Russian channels on Telegram and VKontakte (the so-called Russian Facebook) to publish advertisements promising high salaries and low risks for jobs as drone pilots or truck drivers. The reality, however, can be very different: the contract does not specify the job, and once it has been signed, the Defense Ministry can deploy the recruit to the front line, where dozens of enemy drones may be waiting. Even some countries friendly to Russia, such as India and Cuba, have reported that their citizens have been deceived.Cuba and Colombia are the Latin American countries with the highest numbers of death certificates on the Russian side, although it has not been possible to verify that all those listed were military personnel. EL PAÍS was able to verify 13 death certificates from the Caribbean island and 20 from Colombia, but the total for both countries runs into dozens more.By contrast, the Rosstat leak has made it possible to confirm the combat deaths of other nationals from Brazil (6), Chile (1), El Salvador (13), Haiti (1), Panama (3), Paraguay (1), Peru (7) and Venezuela (2). No citizens of Bolivia, Mexico or Uruguay appear in the documents.Also missing are the thousands of North Koreans who gave their lives for Kim Jong-un’s regime in support of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The BBC estimates that around 2,300 North Korean troops have died in the war, based on its analysis of a memorial in Pyongyang bearing the names of the fallen.Paradoxically, the database does list three South Koreans who died fighting for Russia. The death certificate of one of them, however, contradicts the official account given by the authorities. According to the document, a 40-year-old man born in Daegu died on March 11 this year in the village of Soldatskoye, in Russia’s Kursk region, from “multiple injuries caused by an explosion during combat operations.” Yet on that same day, the regional governor, Alexander Khinshtein, announced the death of a “volunteer” of the same age in the same village, after his “civilian vehicle” was hit by an FPV drone. According to the governor, the dead man was from the Caribbean island nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis.The leak has helped independent Russian media verify several accounts. For example, Volodymyr Podoliak, the older brother of Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak, was killed in May 2024 in Zaporizhzhia while fighting on the Russian side. A two-time recipient of the Order of Courage, he was a member of Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU. His brother, who never commented on his death, described him in 2021 as an “ordinary military pensioner.”A search for “United States” returns just three records, only one of which concerns a soldier killed in combat. Yet none matches the profile of Michael Alexander Gloss, the son of Juliane Gallina, the CIA’s former deputy director for digital innovation. Gloss died on April 4, 2024, at the age of 21, “in eastern Ukraine,” according to statements later made by his family.Russell Bentley, nicknamed the “Donbas Cowboy,” does appear in the database. The Texas native was known for joining Moscow-backed separatist forces in the war in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and 2015. A court in Russian-occupied Donetsk sentenced four Russian soldiers to between 11 and 12 years in prison for torturing and murdering him in April 2024. He was 63 at the time. His death certificate, however, gives the cause of death as “undetermined.”The database also lists Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner mercenary group, who died in August 2023 “from multiple injuries” after the plane he was traveling on crashed suddenly near the village of Kuzhenkino.The mercenary chief’s death certificate stops short of determining whether his death was intentional, two months after he rebelled against the Kremlin. It gives the cause as “Code Y33.8: other specified injuries of undetermined intent.” Ten people died in the crash, including a flight attendant and two civilian pilots. There was never an official account of the investigation, only statements by Putin suggesting that Prigozhin and his subordinates used cocaine and that “fragments of hand grenades were found in the victims’ bodies.”Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition