Death records that two hacker groups say they took from Russia's state statistics agency point to between 394,000 and 450,000 war-related deaths since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Belarusian Cyberpartisans and Silent Crow published their estimates on 7 November, saying they had accessed the internal Demography database of Rosstat, Russia's Federal State Statistics Service, which holds information from death certificates registered between February 2022 and August 2026.

The two groups reached different totals because they counted the records in different ways. The Belarusian Cyberpartisans put the figure at at least 393,881, counting only deaths that the records explicitly tie to military operations. Silent Crow gave a higher figure of up to 450,100, using a broader method that also included non-combat deaths of military personnel and some deaths recorded without a specified cause.

Silent Crow's breakdown of its total shows 356,056 certificates carrying the ICD-10 code Y36 for death due to war operations, and 38,229 carrying combat wording or the code Y89.1 for the late effects of war operations. It also counted 14,160 non-combat deaths of servicemen from causes including illness, road accidents and suicide, and 9,118 records with no stated cause, along with smaller groups flagged by other fields on the certificates. The count excludes the wounded, the missing and foreign fighters, whose deaths never enter Russian registries.

Deaths rose every year, records show

Deaths by year climbed steeply in the leaked records, from 18,877 in 2022 to 42,365 in 2023, 109,683 in 2024 and 182,264 in 2025. The 39,296 logged for 2026 is far from complete: by Silent Crow's estimate, only about 26 per cent of deaths reach the database within a month and about 69 per cent within six months. The published yearly figures sum to 392,485, below the headline total of 450,100, a gap the published analysis does not reconcile. Correcting for the registration lag, Silent Crow puts the real toll at about 504,280 by 28 August and at between 562,979 and 596,888 by the end of 2026.

The records also sketch who died. Code Y36 does not separate soldiers from civilians killed by shelling, but 99.4 per cent of the dead are men, most often aged 35 to 44. The records place 54.9 per cent of deaths in the occupied Donetsk region. By home address, the Volga federal district supplied 21.7 per cent of the dead and the Central district 16.9 per cent, while Siberia and the Far East, home to about a sixth of Russia's population, supplied 26.7 per cent.

Records not independently verified

Neither the leaked records nor the casualty estimates have been independently verified, and Rosstat has denied that its databases were compromised. The hackers said they had been inside Rosstat's network for about six months before the attack, which came overnight between 31 October and 1 November. Rosstat acknowledged that its systems had been targeted in cyberattacks between 29 October and 1 November, but said it found no sign that its databases were compromised or that protected information had leaked. The agency later reported disruption to some of its services and extended deadlines for submitting certain statistical data.

If genuine, the leak would be the first count of Russia's war dead drawn from the state's own registers. Moscow has not disclosed its battlefield losses since September 2022. By comparison, the independent Russian outlet Mediazona, working with BBC Russian and volunteers, had identified 285,881 Russian military personnel killed in Ukraine by name as of 6 November, a count both outlets say is incomplete. Britain's defence ministry said in early September that more than half a million people had died fighting for Russia. The Moscow Times cross-checked a random sample of 50 names from the Mediazona list against the leaked dataset but could not verify the data in its entirety, and the Kyiv Independent said it could not immediately verify the authenticity of the leaked records or the casualty estimates.

The figures were published days before another round of negotiations between Russia, Ukraine and the United States, scheduled for Tuesday in Abu Dhabi. The talks would be the fourth round brokered by the Trump administration, with the most recent meeting held in Geneva in February. Both hacker groups are banned in Russia as extremist organisations.