Hackers claim stolen Rosstat data points to 390,000+ Russian deaths in Ukraine war
Hacker groups Kiberpartizany BY and Silent Crow say they breached Russia's statistics service Rosstat and used the stolen data to estimate Russian war deaths. Their figures range from 393,881 to 450,100; the authenticity of the data has not yet been confirmed.
The hacker groups Kiberpartizany BY and Silent Crow say they carried out a large-scale breach of Rosstat, Russia's Federal State Statistics Service, and claim to have stolen about 23 terabytes of data. According to the hackers, it includes internal documents, demographic and economic statistics, and information on Russian losses in the war against Ukraine. Using this material, the groups produced their own estimates of how many people have died since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.
Two different estimates
Kiberpartizany BY states that at least 393,881 Russian citizens had been killed as of 27 August 2026. Silent Crow gives a higher figure of 450,100. The gap stems from different counting methods. Kiberpartizany BY counted deaths where military action or its consequences were recorded as the cause. Silent Crow also added non-combat losses among military personnel, deaths marked as terrorist acts, and people registered in Russia who died in occupied territories or in Ukraine where the exact cause of death was not established.
Why the figures matter
Russia has not published official combat loss statistics since September 2022. From 2024, Rosstat also stopped releasing annual data on causes of death, making an independent assessment of the war's demographic impact considerably harder.
For comparison, the joint database of the BBC Russian Service and the independent outlet Mediazona held around 286,000 named Russian servicemen killed as of 8 November, though that list is incomplete, particularly for recent months. A joint study by Meduza and Mediazona, based on inheritance registry data, put the number of fallen Russian servicemen at roughly 350,000 by the end of 2025. The hackers' estimates are therefore consistent with earlier independent research, although that does not prove the accuracy of each individual figure.
Verifying the data
Meduza and Mediazona say they have obtained the published data and begun checking it. They aim to establish whether it is authentic and how complete it is, including ruling out deliberate falsification. Causes of death in medical documents also do not always reflect the real circumstances. In addition, Rosstat's internal databases lack up-to-date information on people listed as missing, who can be declared dead only after a long period. Even data from the state statistics agency therefore cannot automatically give a definitive number of Russian military losses.
