Russian authorities have registered the deaths of 11,335 foreigners in the war against Ukraine, according to confidential data held by the country's statistics agency, Rosstat, reviewed by Bloomberg. The foreigners — people who were either born outside Russia or held foreign citizenship — came from nearly 100 countries, and their deaths were recorded between February 24, 2022, the day of the full-scale invasion, and late August 2026.

Source: Bloomberg via EuropeSays

The figures come from a cache of more than 11 million death certificates, with details such as place of birth, citizenship and where people died. The data was obtained by the Belarusian pro-opposition group Cyber Partisans and the Ukrainian hacker operation Silent Crow, and was subsequently shared with Bloomberg and a small group of other outlets. Each of the 11,335 deaths was explicitly linked to the war, either via official coding or text mentioning terms such as “military operation”, “shelling” or “drones”. Rosstat did not reply to a request for comment, Bloomberg reported.

This is a new breakdown of the same leaked records that Awaaz Punjab reported on November 8, when the hackers' data put Russia's total registered war-related deaths at about 400,000. What is new here is the foreign share of that toll — and what it shows about how the Kremlin has sustained its war as Russian losses mounted: as the conflict claimed the lives of more and more Russians, Moscow appears to have deployed more foreign fighters.

The earlier report on the same leaked Rosstat records put Russia's total war dead at about 400,000. Read the November 8 report

Who the foreign dead were

The records suggest the Russian military drew most heavily on the former Soviet states that Moscow considers its sphere of influence. About 3,700 of the foreign dead were either Ukrainian citizens or were born in Ukraine after it gained independence with the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, and among those records that included an address, most lived in occupied areas of eastern and southern Ukraine. About 80% of the rest of the dead were from other former Soviet countries, and just over 6,000 of the 11,335 were born outside Russia but held Russian citizenship when they died — a group Bloomberg notes can include people who were Russian by birth, such as children of Soviet or Russian families living abroad. About 300 records were for Russian citizens born in Germany before 1992, mostly in East German garrison towns such as Potsdam and Magdeburg, where Soviet forces were stationed until 1994. Nearly every foreign military death — 99% of the total — was a man; of the 159 women who died, 154 were from occupied areas of Ukraine.

Source: Bloomberg via EuropeSays

Russia's recruitment abroad appears to have moved in waves, the data shows: a high concentration of deaths from Nepal in 2023 and 2024, from Sri Lanka and China in 2024 and 2025, and then from Colombia, Kenya and Nigeria from late 2025. About 340 of the dead came from Africa — mostly from 2025 onward, with the largest contingents from Egypt, Cameroon, Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana — where Russia has been stepping up recruitment. Ukraine's Secretary of the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, Dmytro Usov, said Russia had recruited about 46,000 foreign nationals as of October, that Ukraine has captured enemy combatants from 59 countries, and that Russia plans to recruit 18,500 foreign nationals this year; a separate estimate by Ukraine's spy chief puts the total of foreign fighters lower, at around 28,000. The Kremlin has denied using deceptive methods to recruit abroad, but several countries — including Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Kenya and Ghana — have raised concerns after stories emerged of foreigners dying on the front lines after being lured to Russia under often false promises of citizenship, money or jobs, and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in August that Russia had set up a special body to review requests from foreign nations. Peru's foreign minister, Carlos Espa, travelled to Moscow last Friday seeking answers over at least 430 Peruvians recruited into Russian forces, of whom 25 have died and more than 180 are missing, according to Peru's government; Espa met his Russian counterpart on Monday and asked Moscow to help repatriate the dead and assist the wounded, his office said.

Source: Bloomberg via EuropeSays; 112.ua / Espreso

Why the true foreign toll is likely higher

Bloomberg cautioned that the hacked data was incomplete and inconsistent in places, especially for 2026, because it sometimes takes months or even years to register a death in combat; some people will have been reported missing, some bodies unidentified, and other deaths may be recorded under unrelated categories. No North Korean fatalities appear in the dataset as war-related, even though North Korea has deployed thousands of troops to help Russia — suggesting Russia did not issue death certificates for North Korean deaths, possibly because they served in foreign units rather than joining Russian forces as individuals. For those reasons, the dataset almost certainly understates the total number of foreign fighters killed.

Silent Crow and Cyber Partisans said on November 1 that they had 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. What happens next: journalists with access to the cache, including Meduza and Mediazona, are continuing to verify the records, and governments whose citizens appear among the dead — Peru's approach to Moscow is the latest example — are pressing Russia for answers about their recruited nationals.

Source: Meduza (Bloomberg report summary)