Hackers claim Russian records show nearly 394,000 war-related deaths

Belarusian hacking group Cyber Partisans says it found 393,881 deaths on Russia’s side in the Ukraine war in records it claims to have obtained from Russia’s statistics agency, Rosstat. The count covers 2022 to 27 August 2026.

The group says it selected death records with codes for warfare or its consequences, as well as entries whose text referred to military or combat operations. It acknowledges that the selection could include Russian civilians killed in fighting and people who died in other wars, although it estimates their share is small. It also says some war deaths may have been missed because they were not registered or their cause was recorded differently.

That means the count cannot simply be read as a verified tally of Russian soldiers killed in combat in Ukraine. Nieuws.nl, citing ANP and Bloomberg, reported that around 400,000 Russian military personnel had been killed in fighting in Ukraine and that nearly 392,700 records contained an explicit reference to war. It is unclear how that figure relates to Cyber Partisans’ count.

A second group, Silent Crow, says it worked with Cyber Partisans to obtain databases from Rosstat’s demographic system. Meduza reports that Silent Crow reached a higher figure of 450,100 using a broader selection that included some non-combat military deaths and certain deaths with no cause listed. The two figures therefore do not measure exactly the same thing.

Other estimates also point to substantial Russian losses. Meduza says its earlier research with Mediazona, based on inheritance records, estimated that 350,000 Russian soldiers had died by the end of 2025. Russia has not officially disclosed its battlefield losses since September 2022, according to The Moscow Times.

Meduza and Mediazona say they are checking the authenticity and completeness of the records released by the hackers. On 1 November, before the death counts were published, Rosstat said it had faced cyberattacks but had found no compromise of its databases or leak of legally protected information, according to Interfax.