Leaked data suggests over 400,000 Russians killed in Ukraine war
Leaked data from Russia's state statistics agency Rosstat indicates that more than 400,000 Russian soldiers have died in the war in Ukraine. The data emerged days before a new round of peace talks in Abu Dhabi.
More than 400,000 Russians have died fighting in Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion almost five years ago, according to leaked records from the country's state statistics agency, Rosstat. The data was obtained by the Belarusian opposition-linked hacker group Cyber Partisans and the Ukrainian hacking collective Silent Crow, and later passed to the Guardian and a few other outlets.
The dataset holds more than 11 million death certificates, including the age, place of residence and place of death of each person. Of these, 412,576 certificates explicitly tie the death to the war, either through official cause-of-death codes or written references to combat or military operations. The hackers announced the breach on 1 November and published the data over the weekend. Rosstat confirmed it was hacked but denied that sensitive information was leaked.
Russian authorities have not released a death toll since the early months of the invasion, and military casualty figures are treated as a state secret. The Guardian could not independently verify the whole dataset, but the numbers broadly match other estimates. British intelligence estimated in September that about 500,000 Russian soldiers had been killed. The independent Russian outlet Mediazona has identified nearly 286,000 dead servicemen by name and believes the real toll is closer to half a million.
An uneven burden
Janis Kluge, head of the Russia and Eurasia division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, said the data looks authentic and very rich, and called it the biggest leak on Russian casualties. He believes the dataset probably understates the true toll, since some soldiers are missing or unidentified and deaths are typically entered into records about six months late.
In Buryatia, Tuva and Zabaykalsky Krai, war deaths made up about a third of all deaths among men aged 18 to 49 from the start of the invasion to mid-2024. In Moscow and St Petersburg the figure was about 10%. In several months of late 2024 and 2025, deaths exceeded 15,000 a month, roughly 500 a day.
Talks in Abu Dhabi
Senior Russian and Ukrainian negotiators are due to meet in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday for the first US-brokered talks between the two countries in nine months. Earlier rounds made little progress, stalling over Moscow's demand that Ukraine withdraw from the part of the Donbas region it still controls. Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy will not attend, while Donald Trump's envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are expected to take part.
