The war between Russia and Ukraine is approaching its fifth year. Moscow launched its full-scale military offensive in Ukraine in February 2022. Because Russia was far stronger militarily, it was assumed at first that Ukraine would not be able to hold out against Russian forces for long.
But with military and financial aid from Western countries and its own resistance, Kyiv is still fighting. Both sides have suffered heavy losses of life in the long conflict. Now leaked Russian government records have laid bare the scale of the deaths among the country’s soldiers. According to this data, more than 400,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the war in Ukraine so far.
The figure was reported last Tuesday by the British newspaper the Guardian. It was obtained by analysing leaked records from Rosstat, Russia’s state statistics agency.
According to the report, the data was gathered jointly by Cyber Partisans, a hacker group linked to the Belarusian opposition, and Silent Crow, a Ukraine-based hacking group. Through a cyberattack on Russian databases they took more than 11 million death certificates. The records include the age, permanent address and place of death of the deceased, among other details.
The two groups made the attack public on 1 November and released the stolen data late last week. Rosstat acknowledged that it had been hit by a cyberattack but said no important or sensitive information had been stolen.
The picture of Russian military deaths in the war that emerges from the leaked records brings to light a large part of what Moscow has kept secret. A few months after the war began, the Russian authorities stopped publishing regular figures on soldiers killed. In Russia, information on soldiers’ deaths in military operations is classified as a state secret.
Among the leaked data, 412,576 death certificates were found to be directly linked to the war. These records state that the person was killed in the military operation or in combat.
The Guardian said it had not been possible to verify all the leaked records independently. But the data matches closely with estimates from other international bodies and research institutes.
An assessment by British intelligence in September also said that about 500,000 Russian soldiers had been killed since the war in Ukraine began. Mediazona, an independent Russian news outlet, has so far identified about 286,000 dead soldiers by name. The outlet estimates that the real death toll may be close to 500,000.
Janis Kluge, head of the Russia and Eurasia division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, considers the leaked data credible. In his view, it is the largest leak yet to come to light on Russian military deaths.
But the researcher also believes the records do not give a full count of the war’s real losses. He explains that many Russian soldiers are still missing, and some soldiers’ identities have not been confirmed. It can also take up to about six months for a soldier’s death to be entered into government records. So a significant number of soldiers may have been killed beyond the leaked count.
Analysis of the records also shows how unevenly the war has hit different regions of Russia. Death rates among soldiers are relatively higher in the country’s poor and remote areas, particularly in the eastern regions of Buryatia, Tuva and Zabaykalsky Krai.
According to the data, from the start of the war to mid-2024, nearly a third of all deaths among men aged 18 to 49 in these regions were war-related. In the capital Moscow and in St Petersburg, by contrast, the war accounted for about 10 percent of deaths among men of the same age.
As the war has dragged on, the number of Russian soldiers killed has risen. Analysis of the leaked records shows that Russia’s army suffered its heaviest losses from late 2024 into several months of 2025.
By German researcher Janis Kluge’s calculation, more than 15,000 Russian soldiers were killed each month in several months of that period. That means an average of about 500 soldiers died every day in some months. The leaked records give a picture of how heavy a human toll this long war has placed on Russia’s armed forces.
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