What the hacked records show
Hackers from the Belarusian group Cyber Partisans and the Ukrainian collective Silent Crow obtained records from Rosstat, Russia's statistics agency, according to Bloomberg, which examined a database of more than 11 million death certificates. Of these, 392,700 certificates dated between February 2022 and the end of August 2026 explicitly refer to the war, through codes or wording such as 'military operation', 'shelling' or 'drones'. Bloomberg could not definitively prove the database was authentic, but it found no sign of forgery, and the figures largely matched previously published official Russian mortality data. The true toll is almost certainly higher, Bloomberg says, because some soldiers are missing, some bodies remain unidentified, and some people died later from wounds without the war being recorded as the cause.
Two counts from two methods
Kiberpartizany BY counts 393,881 soldiers killed since February 2022, a figure dated 27 August 2026. That count covers only deaths that Rosstat records as caused by military action or its consequences. Silent Crow puts the total at 450,100 by also counting victims of terrorist attacks, non-combat military deaths, and Russian residents who died in occupied territories or Ukraine without a recorded cause. Silent Crow's total breaks down into 356,056 certificates coded Y36 for 'war operations', about 38,000 with codes or wording for 'consequences of war operations', 18,000 'killed in military operations', 575 'killed by terrorist acts', nearly 14,000 deaths in occupied areas with no specific cause, more than 14,000 non-combat military deaths and 9,000 deaths of men at the front with no cause given.
Projections and gaps in the data
The authors of the Silent Crow analysis estimate that about 50,000 cases had not yet been entered in the register by 28 August, because registration of deaths can take months. They project the figure could rise to between 563,000 and 597,000 by the end of 2026. Kiberpartizany BY's count runs at an average of 18,280 deaths a month, which the hackers say would pass half a million by late 2026. The totals exclude the wounded, the missing and foreign soldiers killed. Ukrainian figures cited by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung say more than 223,000 Russian families have asked about missing Russian soldiers since 2024. A separate tally by BBC Russian and Mediazona lists about 286,000 soldiers by name, a list both outlets describe as incomplete, particularly for the most recent months.
The hack and Rosstat's response
The hackers said on 1 November that they had breached Rosstat's systems. Rosstat said it had been targeted by cyberattacks between 29 October and 1 November, but maintained that no data had been taken and the attacks had failed. The attacks did delay the publication of several important economic reports by several weeks, according to De Morgen. The hackers claim to have accessed as many as 25,000 computers on Rosstat's network and to have gathered about 23 terabytes of information. NOS reports that Rosstat later confirmed it had been the target of targeted cyberattacks, while denying that confidential data had been stolen. Rosstat stopped publishing annual causes of death from 2024, and Russia has published no official figures on combat losses since September 2022.
Wider debate over the numbers
Russia has never published official figures on its military dead, and Vladimir Putin described military losses incurred in peacetime during special operations, or in wartime, as a state secret, according to De Telegraaf. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated this summer that Russian military deaths were between 400,000 and 450,000, a range close to the hacker figures, according to Il Fatto Quotidiano. The British Ministry of Defence, cited by El Mundo, says Russian casualties have reached 1.5 million, of which half a million were killed. Hackers' data remains unverified by any independent body, and the sources agree that no official Russian count exists to test it against.