Russian civil registries have recorded 450,100 military deaths since February 2022, according to an analysis of death records that hackers say they stole from state statistics agency Rosstat.
The hacker group Silent Crow published the figure on November 7 in an interactive analysis of what it says is Rosstat's extract of medical death certificates, covering deaths registered up to August 28, 2026. The records have not been independently verified, and Rosstat has denied that its databases were compromised.
If genuine, the leak is the first count of Russia's war dead drawn from the state's own registers. Moscow has not disclosed its battlefield losses since September 2022. The data would make the war the fourth most common cause of death in Russia over the period, behind only chronic ischaemic heart disease, COVID-19 and other cerebrovascular diseases.
Of the total, 356,056 certificates carry the ICD-10 code Y36 for "operations of war" and 38,229 carry combat wording or code Y89.1. Silent Crow added 14,160 non-combat deaths of servicemen from illness, road accidents and suicide, 9,118 records with no stated cause and smaller groups flagged by other certificate fields. The count excludes the wounded, the missing and foreign fighters, whose deaths never enter Russian registries.
Code Y36 does not separate soldiers from civilians killed by shelling, but 99.4% of the dead are men, most often aged 35 to 44, according to the analysis.
The Belarusian Cyberpartisans, who claimed the attack on Rosstat jointly with Silent Crow, put the toll lower at 393,881, counting only deaths that the records tie explicitly to military operations, the Kyiv Independent reported on November 7. Both groups are banned in Russia as "extremist".
Rising every year
Deaths by year climbed from 18,877 in 2022 to 42,365 in 2023, 109,683 in 2024 and 182,264 in 2025, the dataset shows. The 39,296 logged for 2026 is far from complete: by Silent Crow's estimate only 26% of deaths reach the database within a month of death and 69% within six months. The listed yearly figures sum to 392,485, below the headline total of 450,100; the published analysis does not reconcile the difference.
Russian military deaths in leaked Rosstat death records by year of death; 2026 covers registrations to August 28 and is incomplete. Source: Silent Crow analysis of leaked Rosstat records, not independently verified. IntelliNews
New records arrived at 18,280 a month in the six months to late August, 1.26 times faster than a year earlier. Correcting for the registration lag, Silent Crow puts the real toll at about 504,280 by August 28 and at 562,979-596,888 by the end of 2026.
The records place 54.9% of deaths in the occupied Donetsk region, with no place of death given for 17%. By home address, the Volga federal district supplied 21.7% of the dead and the Central district 16.9%, while Siberia and the Far East, home to about a sixth of Russia's population, supplied 26.7%.
The Kremlin's recruitment policies amount to the "extermination of entire nations" for some of Russia's smallest ethnic groups, researcher Maria Vyushkova told The Moscow Times.
Other counts
The register total is well above the 285,881 Russian military dead identified by name as of November 6 by Mediazona and BBC Russian, a count both outlets say is incomplete. Britain's defence ministry said in early September that more than half a million people had died fighting for Russia, The Moscow Times reported. The Moscow Times cross-checked a random sample of 50 names from the Mediazona list against the leaked dataset but could not verify the data in its entirety.
Russia has so far replaced its dead with paid volunteers. Western intelligence estimates put recruitment at 25,000-35,000 a month, and Dmitry Medvedev, who oversees volunteer recruitment, said regions signed up about 200,000 contract soldiers in the first half of 2026. The money is getting tighter: at least 11 regions have cut or scrapped payments to the families of soldiers killed in Ukraine since 2025.
The hackers said they had been inside Rosstat's network for about six months before the attack, which came during a weekend of cyberattacks on Russian state systems. Rosstat acknowledged attacks between October 29 and November 1 but said no data had leaked, then reported disruption to some services and extended deadlines for submitting statistics.
"This represents around half a percent of Russia's working-age population of 80 million people," Janis Kluge, head of the Russia and Eurasia division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), told The Moscow Times, adding that the economic effect may be small.
"But the main significance is political," he said. "It's about who is winning this war and you cannot say Russia is winning this war if it is losing population at this rate."
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