Confidential records allegedly obtained from Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) indicate that Russia may have suffered between 3,94,000 and 4,50,000 deaths among personnel fighting on its side in Ukraine since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, Moscow Times reported.

The estimates are based on more than 11 million death certificates reportedly extracted from Rosstat’s internal Demography database. The records contain information including age, place of residence and location of death, and cover deaths registered between February 2022 and August 2026.

Belarusian opposition-linked hacking group Cyber Partisans and Ukrainian hacker group Silent Crow claimed responsibility for accessing the database. Their findings were released on 7 November and subsequently shared with Bloomberg News and several other media organisations.

According to Cyber Partisans, at least 393,881 deaths were identified in records that explicitly attributed fatalities to military operations connected to the war in Ukraine.

Silent Crow’s assessment placed the toll as high as 450,100 deaths. Its broader methodology included non-combat fatalities among military personnel as well as some cases in which the cause of death was not specified.

Data examined by Bloomberg reportedly showed that nearly 392,700 death certificates registered between 24 February 2022 and late August 2026 directly linked the deaths to the conflict.

The hackers stated that they had gained access to Rosstat’s network around six months before the operation became public. They claimed to have gathered internal documents and additional information before targeting the agency’s IT infrastructure during the night of 31 October to 1 November.

Rosstat acknowledged that its systems experienced cyberattacks between 29 October and 1 November. However, the agency denied that its databases had been compromised or that any information had been leaked. It did, nevertheless, report disruptions to some services and extended deadlines for the submission of certain statistical data.

The casualty figures have not been independently verified. The Kyiv Independent reported that it was unable to immediately confirm either the authenticity of the leaked records or the accuracy of the estimates derived from them.

Russia has not publicly disclosed comprehensive military casualty figures since the start of the war, making an exact assessment of losses difficult. The Kremlin has consistently limited official updates on battlefield fatalities, while independent analysts have relied on alternative methods to estimate the human cost of the conflict.

Independent Russian outlet Mediazona, working alongside BBC Russian and volunteers, had verified the deaths of 285,881 Russian military personnel through open-source research as of 6 November. The organisations stressed that their confirmed tally is incomplete and that the actual number of deaths is likely to be considerably higher.

The reported losses have drawn renewed attention to the scale of the war. Open-source mapping data from Ukrainian project DeepState indicates that Russian forces have gained control of roughly 73,000 square kilometres of Ukrainian territory since the invasion began. Based on Silent Crow’s upper estimate of 450,100 deaths, that would equate to approximately six deaths for every square kilometre captured, although the casualty figures remain unverified.

The emergence of the estimates comes ahead of a new round of negotiations involving Russia, Ukraine and the United States in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

The talks are expected to mark the fourth round of discussions brokered by the Trump administration, following an earlier meeting in Geneva in February. Governments supporting the diplomatic effort continue to seek a breakthrough, although major disagreements over territorial control, sovereignty and long-term security arrangements remain unresolved.

A key claim highlighted in the leaked data is that nearly 392,700 death certificates recorded between February 2022 and August 2026 "explicitly linked the fatalities to the war", potentially providing one of the most detailed glimpses yet into the human cost of the conflict if the records are ultimately authenticated.

Agencies