ON NOVEMBER 1st visitors to the website of Rosstat, Russia’s official statistics agency, found an unusual message in Belarusian: “No one can escape responsibility”. Two hacker groups, Silent Crow and Cyber Partisans BY, claimed to be behind the cyberattack. On November 8th they released what they said were the government’s own records of its fatalities in Ukraine.
Care should be taken with them, as they are yet to be independently verified. They are patchy, with duplicates and omissions. But the leaked data line up closely with our own estimates, which are based on assessments from foreign-intelligence officials, independent researchers and information from the front lines. Think-tanks and war analysts also suspect the leaked records are genuine.
Rosstat’s database included 450,100 recorded deaths marked with a war-related code. Even that is likely to be an undercount, since deaths take months to process, meaning recent ones will not yet be included. Adjusting for such delays, Silent Crow estimates that 504,000 Russian soldiers had died by August 28th this year. The toll has roughly doubled every year of the war. At current trends, about 230,000 Russian men may be killed this year.
The two hacker groups have hit big targets before. Silent Crow, purportedly a Ukrainian outfit, claimed to have broken into Rosreestr, Russia’s property registry in 2024. Cyber Partisans, which is linked to the Belarusian opposition, claimed an attack on Belarusian Railway in 2022 to slow Russian troop movements. In 2025 they together claimed to have broken into the systems of Aeroflot, Russia’s flagship carrier, grounding more than 100 flights.
The files would be the latest evidence of Russia’s enormous losses in Ukraine. They imply that at least 0.9% of Russian men under 60 before the war have been killed. Ukraine has held the front while sacrificing far fewer. But its death toll—which UALosses, a website, puts at 115,952 soldiers so far—represents 1.1% of its pre-war population of men under 60. Another 105,788 are missing.
Although the Russian state tries to cover up its losses, most citizens assume they are colossal. Mediazona, an exiled Russian media outlet, and the BBC Russian service have identified more than 285,000 by name. According to a recent poll, 37% of Russians have relatives who have participated in the conflict. The leak, if genuine, indicates the Russian president should be well aware of the scale of the toll his war is taking. The evidence thus far suggests he is nonetheless unlikely to change course.
Leave a Reply