Key facts
- Belarusian Cyberpartisans estimated at least 393,881 deaths from records naming military operations as the cause.
- Silent Crow put the toll at up to 450,100, including non-combat military deaths and deaths with no stated cause.
- The groups said the records came from Rosstat's internal Demography database of death certificates from February 2022 to August 2026.
- Rosstat denied its databases were compromised or information leaked.
- Mediazona, working with BBC Russian and volunteers, had identified 285,881 Russian military deaths as of November 6.
Hacker groups Belarusian Cyberpartisans and Silent Crow, which said they carried out a cyberattack on Russia's Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat), said on November 7 that leaked death records indicate between 394,000 and 450,000 people fighting on Russia's side or otherwise linked to the war have died since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.
The groups said they took the records from Rosstat's internal Demography database, which holds information from death certificates registered between February 2022 and August 2026. Belarusian Cyberpartisans estimated at least 393,881 deaths from records that explicitly name military operations as the cause. Silent Crow published a higher estimate of up to 450,100 deaths using a broader method that also counted non-combat deaths of military personnel and some deaths recorded without a stated cause.
The Kyiv Independent, which reported the claims, said it could not immediately verify the authenticity of the leaked records or the groups' casualty estimates. The hackers said they had access to Rosstat's network for about six months before the attack, collecting internal documents and other data before targeting the agency's IT infrastructure overnight on October 31 to November 1.
Rosstat acknowledged that its systems were targeted in cyberattacks between October 29 and November 1 but denied that its databases had been compromised or information leaked. The agency later reported disruptions to some of its services and extended deadlines for submitting certain statistical data.
Russia does not disclose its military casualties in Ukraine. As of November 6, the independent Russian outlet Mediazona, working with BBC Russian and volunteers, had identified 285,881 Russian military personnel killed in Ukraine through open-source research, a count the journalists have repeatedly said is incomplete and well below the actual toll.
Estimates based on data from the Ukrainian open-source mapping project DeepState put Russian territorial gains in Ukraine at about 73,000 square kilometers (28,200 square miles) since February 2022. Set against Silent Crow's upper figure of 450,100, that would work out to roughly six deaths for every square kilometer seized, though the hackers' casualty figures have not been independently verified.