Hacked Russian statistics records suggest that about 390,000 to 450,000 Russians died in the war in Ukraine, according to figures obtained by the hacker groups Cyber Partisans and Silent Crow and shared with Bloomberg. The records come from Rosstat, Russia’s federal statistics agency, and the authenticity of the data has not been confirmed.
According to Straits Times, the hacked Rosstat data draws on more than 11 million death certificates, with details such as residence, age and place of death. Almost 392,700 of those certificates, dated between Feb. 24, 2022, and late August 2026, explicitly link the death to the war through coding or text terms such as "military operation", "shelling" or "drones", the outlet reported.
A separate count comes from Kiberpartizany BY, a Belarusian pro-opposition group, which says at least 393,881 Russian citizens had been killed in the war as of Aug. 27, 2026, according to Euronews. Silent Crow gives a higher figure of 450,100, according to the same outlet.
Euronews reported that Silent Crow’s larger total includes non-combat military losses, deaths marked as terrorist acts, and deaths in occupied territories or Ukraine where the cause was not established. The two figures differ and may use different cutoff dates or methods.
The hackers said on Nov. 1 that they gained access to about 25,000 Rosstat computers and extracted some 23 TB of data, according to Straits Times. Japan Times also reported that the hacked records show 400,000 Russians killed, citing material obtained by a Belarusian pro-opposition group and a Ukrainian hacker operation. Japan Times was available to this article only as a headline and short excerpt, so the account of that report is limited.
Rosstat has disputed the hackers’ account of a breach. The agency said it detected targeted cyberattacks between Oct. 29 and Nov. 1, but found no evidence that its databases were compromised or that confidential information leaked. It said it was restoring systems after an attack.
The figures are not new in scale. Russia made military losses in special operations or war a state secret in 2015, and it has released no casualty figures since the early months of the invasion. Independent estimates include 285,881 named deaths compiled by Mediazona and the BBC Russian service, and about 352,000 deaths through December 2025 by Mediazona and Meduza, based on probate records. Ukraine’s General Staff says Russia has suffered 1.6 million deaths and serious injuries; that claim is Ukraine’s and has not been independently verified.
Meduza and Mediazona are still checking the hacked data’s authenticity and completeness. Officials from Russia, Ukraine and the United States are due to meet in Abu Dhabi this week to discuss a potential ceasefire.
Several gaps remain. Rosstat did not respond to a request for comment and has made no official response to the breach claim beyond its initial statement. The figures come from the hacker groups and their own calculations, and no independent party has verified them. The Straits Times excerpt ends mid-report, so regional and age breakdowns are incomplete, and the Kremlin’s response to the figures is not reflected in the sources available to this article.
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This article was written with AI assistance from the published reporting listed above. It is part of the World Brief daily news podcast.