More than 400,000 Russian soldiers have died since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to leaked data from the Russian state statistics agency Rosstat. As the British newspaper The Guardian reported on Monday, 9 November, 412,576 death certificates establish a direct link between the deaths and the war, either through official cause-of-death codes or through written references to combat operations and military operations.
According to The Guardian, the data comes from the hacker group Cyber Partisans, linked to the Belarusian opposition, and the Ukrainian hacker collective Silent Crow. The two groups announced the attack on 1 November and published the data at the weekend. The dataset comprises more than eleven million death certificates with details of the deceased’s age, place of residence and place of death. Rosstat confirmed the hack but denied the loss of sensitive information. The Austrian newspaper Die Presse also reported on the leak on Wednesday, 11 November.
Why the figure is probably too low
The Guardian was unable to independently verify the authenticity of the entire dataset. However, the figures largely match other estimates. Janis Kluge, head of the Russia and Eurasia research group at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in Berlin, told the newspaper that the data looked authentic and that it was “the largest leak of data on Russian losses”. At the same time, Kluge pointed to the delay between a death and its entry in official registers, which is usually about six months. “We are currently probably closer to 500,000 killed Russian soldiers than to 400,000,” he said.
According to The Guardian, British intelligence estimated in September that about 500,000 Russian soldiers had been killed since the start of the invasion. The independent Russian outlet Mediazona has identified by name almost 286,000 Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine using official records, obituaries on social media and photographs of gravestones, and suspects the actual figure is closer to half a million.
Poor regions bear the burden
According to The Guardian, the data also shows how unevenly the losses are distributed across Russia. In Buryatia, Tuva and the Transbaikal region in the east of the country, war-related deaths accounted for about a third of all deaths among men aged 18 to 49 between the start of the invasion and mid-2024. In Moscow and St Petersburg the share was around 10%.
The Russian authorities have not published casualty figures since the first months of the invasion; information about military losses is treated as a state secret. According to The Guardian’s assessment, Russia’s military deaths in Ukraine in less than five years exceed the combined losses of all Soviet and Russian wars since the end of the Second World War by more than eight times, and are also higher than US military losses in the Second World War.
In the middle of the year, the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) estimated the number of deaths on the Ukrainian side at 125,000 to 150,000; Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke at the time of around 50,000 dead, Die Presse reported, citing the APA news agency.
Whether the publication will move Moscow to make concessions is open. The Guardian quotes a person familiar with the Russian president’s thinking as saying that Vladimir Putin understands these figures, and that settling now for less than everything he wants would feel to him like a betrayal of himself and of the people. On Tuesday, 10 November, senior Russian and Ukrainian negotiators met in Abu Dhabi for US-mediated talks for the first time in nine months; neither Putin nor Zelensky took part. According to The Guardian, the US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were also due to take part.
