Leaked records put Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine war at nearly 400,000

Nearly 400,000 Russian citizens have been killed since Russia launched its full-scale military operation in Ukraine almost five years ago. A team of hackers and investigative journalists reached this figure after analysing leaked confidential documents from Rosstat, Russia's official statistics agency. The estimate follows a review of more than 10 million death certificates.

According to a report in the Japan Times, the Belarusian opposition hacker group Cyber Partisans and the Ukrainian hacker group Operation Silent Crow collected the documents from Rosstat's database and shared them with a small group of news outlets.

The documents show that from 24 February 2022 to the end of August 2026, 392,700 death certificates listed war directly as the cause of death. These certificates used words such as ‘military operation’, ‘shelling’ and ‘drone’.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has long tried to conceal the true number of Russian casualties in the Ukraine war. Since 2015, information about soldiers' losses in special military operations in peacetime has been declared a state secret. Russia has not officially published any casualty figures since the first few months of the full-scale attack on Ukraine.

Analysts believe the death toll found in the leaked documents may be lower than the real figure, because it is difficult to determine the exact number of those killed on the battlefield. Many soldiers are still missing, many bodies have not been identified, and others died months after being wounded on the battlefield.

According to Operation Silent Crow's own estimate, including non-combat deaths, the number of Russian citizens who have died could be around 450,000. Rosstat did not respond to a request for comment on the matter.

As Russia has limited the publication of casualty information since the war began, the leaked documents present an important picture of the war's toll. They show that the number of Russian soldiers killed rose sharply after the Russian advance in eastern Ukraine stalled and Kyiv's resistance strengthened.

Ukraine and Western intelligence agencies claim that in October alone, 54,000 Russian soldiers were killed or seriously wounded. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told French media last February that at least 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been killed in the war, and that many more remain missing.

Having failed to achieve major success on the battlefield, Russia is now carrying out heavy bombing of Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. At the same time, the Kremlin is trying to pressure the United States to persuade Ukraine to give up more territory as a condition for ending the war. Officials from Russia, Ukraine and the United States are due to meet in Abu Dhabi this week to discuss possible ceasefire terms.

Meanwhile, Cyber Partisans and Silent Crow claimed on 1 November that they had entered Rosstat's internal network, taken control of around 25,000 computers and collected 23 terabytes of data.

A few days later, Rosstat admitted that its system had suffered a cyberattack between 29 October and 1 November, but the agency denied that any data had been leaked.

According to several sources familiar with the Russian military, the figure of nearly 400,000 deaths is realistic, though independently verifying the casualty numbers is difficult. A joint investigation by the independent Russian news outlet Mediazona and the BBC Russian Service has so far identified the names of 28,881 fallen soldiers.

In addition, a joint estimate by Mediazona and Meduza puts the number of Russian soldiers killed in the Ukraine war at around 350,000 by December 2025. Ukraine's General Staff, on the other hand, claims that 1.6 million Russian soldiers have been killed or seriously wounded since the war began.