Russian military deaths in Ukraine war leaked data, Digi Mart USA News: One of the many secrets surrounding Vladimir Putin has reportedly been exposed. The Belarusian opposition hacker group CyberPartisan and the pro-Ukrainian collective SilentCrow say they penetrated the internal systems of Rosstat, Russia’s federal state statistics service, and claim to have uncovered the deaths of roughly 400,000 Russians in the war in Ukraine.
Bloomberg reported the data on November 8.
According to CyberPartisan, 393,881 Russians died in the war between February 24, 2022, and August 28, 2026. The group says its methodology tracks codes recorded on death certificates and short texts containing terms such as “military operation,” “shelling” or “drones.”
SilentCrow published figures that differ slightly because of different calculation methods. According to its Telegram channel, 426,822 people died under code Y36, “operations of war,” and Y89.1, meaning “combat formulation without code.” The group also adds about 25,000 deaths not linked to combat, such as road accidents or illness, as well as deaths with no declared cause.
Of the deaths cited, 99.4% are men, and most of those who died were between 30 and 50 years old.
The two groups said on November 1 that over six months they infiltrated 25,000 Rosstat workstations and extracted 23 terabytes of data, which allowed them to review 11 million death certificates. A few days later, Rosstat said it had detected targeted cyberattacks on its systems between October 29 and November 1.
However, it said it found no evidence that its databases had been compromised or that confidential information had been disclosed.
Distinguishing confirmed deaths from total casualties remains essential in wartime. CyberPartisan, an opposition group opposed to Lukashenko, says total personnel losses in military conflicts are generally three to five times higher than confirmed deaths.
The figures illustrate the difficulty the Kremlin faces in protecting its soldiers’ lives in Ukraine, a conflict that is increasingly affecting Russian society. Faced with the cost of the war, several regions have announced reductions or the end of compensation payments tied to the loss of a relative at the front.
Where a location is recorded, the hackers say 33.3% of soldiers died in the Donetsk People’s Republic, and the second most affected region was Kursk Oblast. Not all records specify a place of death; one in three does not.
The Kremlin had long sought to keep Russian losses in Ukraine out of public view. In 2015, a year after the annexation of Crimea, a presidential decree classified information on military losses incurred “in peacetime, during special operations” or in wartime as a state secret.
After the February 2022 invasion, the Russian parliament adopted legislation targeting statements about the conflict. Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code provides for up to 15 years in prison for “false” information about the course of the war or losses that does not come from official Russian Defense Ministry statements.
Several organizations and intelligence services have also tried to estimate Russian losses. The Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) reported in a study that about 325,000 Russian soldiers were killed between February 2022 and December 2025, with 875,000 others wounded or missing.
In May 2026, British intelligence GCHQ estimated nearly 500,000 Russian soldiers had been killed since February 2022. BBC Russian, working with the independent Russian outlet Mediazona, identified 223,539 deaths as of May 29, 2026.
