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Leaked Records Show Over 400000 Russian Deaths in Ukraine War

6 sources · updated 2026-11-10
Federal State Statistics Service
Photo: Ludvig14 / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0 · file · licence
Left 83% Center 0% Right 17%
5 left · 0 center · 1 right

What happened

Belarusian and Ukrainian anti-Kremlin hacking groups say they breached Russia's federal statistics service, Rosstat, around November 1 and extracted internal civil-registry data on deaths linked to the war in Ukraine. The groups, Cyber Partisans and Silent Crow, report that by analyzing about 11 million death certificates they found 356,056 Russians listed with "operations of war" as the cause of death, another 57,100 with other war-related or "terrorist act" causes, and 36,949 more with unclear or possibly war-related causes, for a total of roughly 400,000 war deaths since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022. They say the dataset covers where the dead came from, where they died, and shows that annual war-death entries rose sharply from 2022 through 2025, with war becoming one of Russia's leading causes of death. Rosstat has acknowledged being targeted by a coordinated cyberattack and confirmed a hack occurred but has denied that any sensitive data were stolen or leaked. The hacked figures, shared with outlets including Business Insider, Bloomberg, and the New York Post, are broadly in line with independent estimates by Western officials and analysts that put Russian military fatalities in the hundreds of thousands, though none of these counts include missing personnel or the far larger number of wounded.
Sourcing check · Partly on the record · 6 articles

2 of 5 articles cite a named source for the story. It was on the record from the first report.

What these terms mean and how they're counted
On the record · names a source 2 of 5
On the record means the article cites a source by name for the story's main claim: a person, or an institution speaking officially, such as a company statement or a named agency's spokesperson. The opposite is an unnamed source. The count is how many of the counted articles cite at least one such source; the names are everyone named across them, each once however the articles spell it. Here: Cyber Partisans, Silent Crow, Rosstat, Mediazona and Volodymyr Zelensky
Primary evidence · cites a document or data 3 of 5
Primary evidence means the article cites a record you could check yourself: a court filing or ruling, a dataset or report, a recording or transcript, an official statement or press release, market data. A quote is not a document. The count is how many articles cite one. Here: dataset, confidential data
Credits another outlet 0 of 5
The article says the story comes from another outlet's reporting (“first reported by Reuters”). Those articles relay the story; they are not independent confirmation. Here: Each article presents its own reporting.
Unnamed sources 1 of 5
The main claim is attributed to people who are not identified: “people familiar with the matter”, “officials said”. The count is how many articles do this. Here: e.g. “confidential data”
How it developed
When the first report landed and whether it named anyone; when the first named source and the first document appeared. Here: First report Nov 8, 16:45 UTC by Bloomberg, naming its source. First document in the first report, from Bloomberg (dataset).
Not counted 1
Opinion, analysis and video pieces, and articles too short to assess. Every count above is out of the counted articles. An article republished under a new headline is one article.
This is about who is cited, not whether the story is true. Each source below says what it names. How we count
Omitted — what each side leaves out

Unpacked

The biggest gap is that right-leaning coverage emphasizes a single enormous death toll while left-leaning coverage explains its internal pattern and trajectory. Business Insider reports the hackers' year by year war-death entries and notes that war has become Russia's fourth-leading cause of death, with data on which regions and age bands are most affected. The New York Post presents the total and a broad comparison to past wars, so its reader sees historical magnitude but not how the burden is distributed or how fast it has accelerated. The secondary pattern is tone, with right-leaning language more graphic about Russian methods. The New York Post describes Moscow's approach as 'meat-grinder tactics'. Left-leaning outlets talk instead in administrative terms, repeating phrases like 'combat deaths' or 'operations of war' taken from registry codes. None of the coverage answers a basic question: how, at the level of fields or codes, the hackers distinguished combatant war deaths from civilian or indirectly related deaths inside Rosstat's raw certificates.
Bottom line

By foregrounding granular Rosstat data on who is dying and when, Business Insider gives a very different picture of Russia's roughly 400,000 war dead than the New York Post, which concentrates on one headline total and a sweeping claim that it exceeds all Russian combat losses since World War II.

The receipts — 3 facts one side's coverage lacks
  • Annual Rosstat war-death entries reportedly rose from 18,877 in 2022 to 182,264 in 2025, indicating a sharp acceleration over time. numberin Business Insider · absent from right-leaning coverage
  • Hackers' analysis says war has become Russia's fourth-most common cause of death, with 99.4% of the dead being men and the largest group aged 35–44. contextin Business Insider · absent from right-leaning coverage
  • The death toll is described as nine times greater than all Soviet and Russian fatalities in all wars combined since World War II. contextin New York Post · absent from left-leaning coverage
The Left View
Left-leaning coverage frames the hacked Rosstat trove as rare, internal confirmation of the human cost of Russia's invasion, emphasizing both scale and granularity. Business Insider reports the breakdown of 356,056 death records explicitly coded as "operations of war", plus tens of thousands more with other war-related causes, and notes that this excludes the missing, wounded, and foreign fighters, so likely understates total losses. It highlights the social pattern: most of the dead are men, heavily concentrated in the 35–44 age range, with nearly 40,000 aged 18–24, and disproportionate losses from regions such as the Volga, Rostov, and Krasnodar. Left-leaning outlets also stress that annual death entries jumped from under 20,000 in 2022 to over 180,000 in 2025 and that, according to the hackers' analysis, war has become Russia's fourth-most common cause of death, while pointing out that Rosstat denies any data were leaked even as Western military estimates of Russian fatalities align with the hacked numbers.
The Right View
Right-leaning coverage treats the leak primarily as proof that Russia has suffered historically extreme battlefield losses under President Vladimir Putin. The New York Post cites 412,576 Rosstat death certificates tied to the war and asserts that this toll surpasses all Soviet and Russian fatalities in every conflict since World War II and is nine times higher than those prior postwar losses. It underscores that independent work by the Russian outlet Mediazona, which directly identified about 286,000 dead and extrapolated a total near 500,000, and separate analysis by The Economist broadly match the hacked tally and British intelligence estimates, reinforcing the credibility of the leak. Right-leaning reporting links the casualty figures to political pressure on Putin to order another unpopular mass mobilization and notes Ukraine's claim of 54,000 Russian casualties in October alone, while also mentioning ongoing trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi involving Russian, Ukrainian, and US representatives about a potential post-war security arrangement.
Our Take (balanced)
The left-leaning argument is strongest where it treats the Rosstat leak as a detailed window into who is dying and how the tempo of losses is changing, backed by specific registry categories, regional and age breakdowns, and a year-by-year rise that appears to make war one of Russia's top causes of death. The right-leaning argument is strongest where it situates the same rough total around 400,000 within a broader arc of Russian military history and independent casualty work by Mediazona, The Economist, and Western governments, arguing that the hacked data corroborate a picture of unprecedented, potentially regime-straining losses. The core unresolved tension is how confidently anyone can translate these hacked civil-registry entries into a definitive wartime death toll and, depending on where the true figure lies within the various estimates, what that scale of loss actually implies for Russia's military sustainability, domestic politics, and incentives in any future negotiations.

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