Russia's own death registers record about 400,000 of its people killed in the war in Ukraine, according to confidential data from the state statistics agency Rosstat that two hacker groups say they stole and shared with Bloomberg News and a small group of other outlets. Between February 24, 2022, when the full-scale invasion began, and late August 2026, almost 392,700 death certificates in the leaked data explicitly link the death to the war — through official cause-of-death coding or through text on the certificate mentioning terms such as “military operation”, “shelling” or “drones”, Bloomberg reported on November 9.
Source: Bloomberg via EuropeSays/SMH
The dataset — more than 11 million death certificates — was obtained by Silent Crow, a Ukrainian hacker operation, and the Belarusian pro-opposition group Cyber Partisans, which said on November 1 that they had breached Rosstat's internal infrastructure, accessed about 25,000 computers and extracted about 23 terabytes of data. Rosstat acknowledged targeted cyberattacks between October 29 and November 1 but said it found no evidence that its databases had been compromised or that confidential information had leaked; it did not respond to Bloomberg's request for comment on the casualty figures. The leaked records have not been independently verified in full, and every figure in this report comes from the hackers' data or from researchers working with it.
Source: Bloomberg via EuropeSays/SMH; bne IntelliNews
Why the two hacker counts differ
The gap between the two hacker figures is a matter of method, not arithmetic. Of the certificates, 356,056 carry the ICD-10 code Y36, “operations of war”, and a further 38,229 carry combat wording or the code for late effects of war, bne IntelliNews reported. The Cyber Partisans counted only deaths the records tie explicitly to military operations and called 393,881 a minimum. Silent Crow cast a wider net — adding combat deaths recorded without a code, deaths of servicemen from illness, accidents and suicide, and an estimate for men with no stated cause in districts near the front — to reach 450,100, and estimated that correcting for slow registration would put the true toll higher still. The Kyiv Independent said it could not immediately verify the authenticity of the records, and The Moscow Times, which cross-checked a random sample of 50 names from the Mediazona list against the dataset, said it could not verify the data in its entirety. “This is the most significant leak of data when it comes to Russian casualties,” Janis Kluge, head of the Russia and Eurasia division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told The Moscow Times.
Source: bne IntelliNews; The Moscow Times; Kyiv Independent
How the leak compares with other counts
The leaked register sits well above the 285,881 Russian military dead that Mediazona and BBC Russian had identified by name as of November 6 — a count both outlets stress is incomplete — and above the roughly 352,000 that Mediazona and Meduza estimated from Russia's probate registry through December 2025, a method that excludes combatants from occupied Ukraine. People familiar with the situation in the Russian military told Bloomberg that an estimate of about 400,000 Russian war deaths is realistic. Ukraine's General Staff claims Russia has suffered 1.6 million deaths and serious injuries since the invasion began — Kyiv's figure, which counts the wounded alongside the dead and has not been independently verified. Russia has not officially disclosed its battlefield losses since September 2022, and Rosstat gradually stopped publishing many statistics after the invasion.
Source: Bloomberg via EuropeSays/SMH
Who is dying: older soldiers, poorer regions
The records reviewed by Bloomberg show how the burden has shifted as the war has ground on. In the first half of 2022, only 146 men aged 50 to 59 died of war-related causes — under 1% of all deaths in that age group. In the first six months of 2025, more than 12,600 men in that bracket died of war causes, over 16% of the cohort's deaths, while for men aged 18 to 29 the war accounted for about two-thirds of all deaths in the same period. In the remote Siberian republics of Buryatia, Tuva and Zabaykalsky Krai, about one-third of men aged 18 to 49 who died between the invasion and mid-2024 were recorded as war-related; in Moscow and St Petersburg it was about one in ten. The dataset almost certainly understates the total: some dead are missing or unidentified, and registration lags keep growing — in August 2026 alone, more than 2,500 war deaths that had occurred in 2025 appeared in the database. Nearly 37,800 military deaths have been recorded so far for 2026, a figure that will rise as late registrations arrive.
Source: Bloomberg via EuropeSays/SMH
What happens next
The leak lands as the Kremlin faces record battlefield losses — Ukraine and Western intelligence agencies put Russian troops killed or seriously wounded in October at 54,000, the highest monthly figure of the war — and as monthly losses often exceed recruitment, raising the prospect of a more aggressive mobilisation; Moscow has been cutting some sign-up bonuses as its finances come under pressure. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told French media in February that at least 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed, with a large number missing. Russian, Ukrainian and US delegations are due to meet in Abu Dhabi on November 10–11 for talks brokered by US envoy Steve Witkoff on ending the war. Whether Moscow comments on the leaked figures — and whether independent researchers can verify more of the dataset against named-dead lists — will decide how much weight the roughly 400,000 figure carries; for now it stands as the first casualty count drawn from the Russian state's own registers, published by hackers, partly cross-checked by journalists, and denied as a leak by the agency that kept the records.