Hackers from Belarus and Ukraine say Rosstat records show nearly 400,000 Russians killed in the war – sources

At least 393,881 Russians were killed in the war against Ukraine from 2022 to August 27, 2026, claim the Belarusian hacker group Cyber Partisans, who say they reached the figure by counting death certificates from the systems of Russia’s statistics agency Rosstat. Their partners in the Ukrainian group Silent Crow, using a broader method, arrive at about 450,000. Moscow has published no losses since September 2022, and Rosstat denies that data leaked. These are claims by the hackers that have not been independently verified.

The two groups announced on November 1 that they had gained access to about 25,000 of the agency’s computers, to domain controllers of the central office, the regional offices and Rosstat’s Central Interregional Data Processing Center, and downloaded about 23 terabytes. Among the systems they say they breached are the electronic document archive and the “Demography” database, with census data and causes of death. Rosstat admitted targeted cyberattacks from October 29 to November 1, but said it found no sign that its databases were breached or confidential information leaked.

How the hackers counted

The Cyber Partisans explain that they kept only deaths coded Y36 (war operations) or Y89.1 (consequences of war operations) under the international ICD-10 classification, plus records where the war cause is written in words. They acknowledge the figure may include a small share of civilians and that registration errors or incomplete records may leave some dead out. Silent Crow also counts soldiers who died of non-war causes and records without a clear cause, and has built a website with the data.

The hackers shared the death database with a small number of outlets. In an analysis by Bloomberg of more than 11 million certificates, reported by The Japan Times, nearly 392,700 deaths are explicitly tied to the war, so the toll approaches 400,000. In the first half of 2022 only 146 deaths of men aged 50-59 from a war-related cause had been recorded. In the first half of 2025 there were over 12,600, more than one in six deaths in that age group. In Buryatia, Tuva and the Zabaykalsky Territory, about one in three men aged 18-49 who died up to mid-2024 is recorded as a war victim, against one in ten in Moscow and St Petersburg.

For 2026 almost 37,800 military deaths have already been registered, with the registration lag growing. The Russian independent outlet Mediazona and the BBC’s Russian service have identified 285,881 dead by name. The figures emerge days before the Russia-Ukraine-US talks in Abu Dhabi, covered in our report on Barrot’s remarks.