Hackers say leaked Rosstat files show up to 450,000 Russian war deaths

Two hacker crews say they cracked open Russia's own death records, and the numbers are grim. Belarusian Cyberpartisans and Silent Crow, who claim credit for a cyberattack on Russia's Federal State Statistics Service, said on Nov. 7 that the leaked files point to between 394,000 and 450,000 deaths among people fighting for Russia or otherwise tied to the war since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began.

The groups say the records came from Rosstat's internal Demography database, covering death certificates registered between February 2022 and August 2026. Cyberpartisans counted at least 393,881 deaths where military operations were explicitly listed as the cause. Silent Crow landed higher, estimating up to 450,100 using a wider net that also swept in non-combat deaths of military personnel and cases logged without any stated cause.

Getting there took patience. The hackers say they sat inside Rosstat's network for roughly six months, quietly hoovering up internal documents before hitting the agency's IT infrastructure overnight on Oct. 31–Nov. 1.

Rosstat isn't playing along. The agency acknowledged it was targeted in cyberattacks between Oct. 29 and Nov. 1 but insists its databases were neither compromised nor leaked. It later reported disruptions to some services and extended deadlines for submitting certain statistical data.

The Kyiv Independent could not immediately verify the authenticity of the records or the casualty estimates. Russia doesn't publish its military losses, so outside assessments are the only yardstick — and they run lower. As of Nov. 6, independent Russian outlet Mediazona, working with BBC Russian and volunteers, had identified 285,881 Russian military personnel killed in Ukraine through open-source research. Those journalists have repeatedly stressed their count is incomplete and the true toll is considerably higher.

For scale, the Ukrainian open-source mapping project DeepState estimates Russia has seized roughly 73,000 square kilometers (28,200 square miles) of Ukrainian territory since February 2022. Stack that against Silent Crow's top figure and you get about six deaths for every square kilometer taken — a ratio built on numbers nobody outside the hack has yet confirmed.