Leaked Russian records point to up to 450,000 war-related deaths since 2022
Between 394,000 and 450,000 people fighting on Russia’s side or otherwise linked to the war in Ukraine may have died since the start of Moscow’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, according to death records allegedly obtained from Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) by two hacker groups. Belarusian Cyberpartisans and Silent Crow, which claimed responsibility for a cyberattack on Rosstat, published the estimates on November 7, saying they had accessed the agency’s internal Demography database containing information from death certificates registered between February 2022 and August 2026. As of November 6, independent Russian outlet Mediazona, working with BBC Russian and volunteers, had identified 285,881 Russian military personnel killed in Ukraine through open-source research.
Russia does not disclose its military casualties in Ukraine, making independent assessments of the death toll difficult. The journalists have repeatedly stressed that their verified count is incomplete and that the actual death toll is considerably higher.