More than 400,000 Russians have been killed fighting in Ukraine since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion nearly five years ago, according to leaked data from the country’s state statistics agency, Rosstat. The data, obtained by the Belarusian opposition-linked hacker group Cyber Partisans and the Ukrainian hacking collective Silent Crow, contains more than 11 million death certificates, including details of the deceased’s age, place of residence and location of death. It was later shared with the Guardian and a small group of other outlets.
Of those, according to the groups’ data, 412,576 death certificates explicitly linked the fatalities to the war, either through official cause-of-death codes or written references to combat and military operations. The figures underscore the staggering human toll of Russia’s nearly five-year invasion of Ukraine, with no end to the war in sight despite a fresh round of peace talks scheduled to take place in Abu Dhabi this week. The two hacking groups announced the breach on 1 November and published the data over the weekend.
Rosstat confirmed it had been hacked but denied that any sensitive information had been leaked. The dataset offers an unprecedentedly detailed picture of Russia’s wartime losses, which Moscow has sought to conceal. The Russian authorities have not published a death toll since the early months of the invasion, and information about military casualties is treated as a state secret.
The Guardian could not independently verify the authenticity of the entire dataset. However, the figures are broadly consistent with other estimates of Russian losses. British intelligence in September previously estimated that about 500,000 Russian soldiers had been killed since the start of the invasion.
Separately, the independent Russian outlet Mediazona has identified by name nearly 286,000 Russian military personnel killed in Ukraine, drawing on official records, social media obituaries and photographs of gravestones. The outlet estimates that the true death toll is closer to half a million. The dataset is likely to underestimate the true death toll.
Some soldiers remain missing, while others have never been identified. Kluge also pointed to a significant delay between deaths occurring and being entered into official records, which he said typically amounted to about six months. The figures reveal the starkly unequal burden of the war across Russia, with poorer and more remote regions suffering disproportionately heavy losses.
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