Leaked data from the Russian state statistics agency Rosstat indicates that more than 400,000 Russian soldiers have died fighting in Ukraine since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion nearly five years ago. The Belarusian opposition-linked hacker group Cyber Partisans and the Ukrainian collective Silent Crow obtained the information, which contains over 11 million death certificates detailing age, residence, and location of death. They announced the breach on 1 November and published the dataset over the weekend. According to the records, 412,576 death certificates explicitly linked fatalities to the war through official cause-of-death codes or written references to combat operations.
Unprecedented Scale and Regional Disparity
The figures reveal a staggering human toll that Moscow has sought to conceal by treating military casualties as a state secret. Janis Kluge, head of the Russia and Eurasia division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, stated that "the data looks authentic, and it’s very rich." He noted that this is the biggest leak of data regarding Russian casualties, although he warned the true count likely exceeds the leaked figure because some soldiers remain missing or unidentified. Kluge pointed out a typical six-month delay between deaths and their entry into official records, suggesting the actual number is closer to 500,000 killed Russian soldiers than 400,000. British intelligence estimated about 500,000 deaths in September, while the independent outlet Mediazona identified nearly 286,000 by name but estimates the total is near half a million.
The burden of these losses falls unevenly across Russia, with poorer and remote regions sustaining disproportionately heavy casualties. In Buryatia, Tuva, and Zabaykalsky Krai, war-related fatalities accounted for about a third of all deaths among men aged 18 to 49 between the start of the invasion and mid-2024. By contrast, the equivalent figure in Moscow and St Petersburg was only about 10%. Battlefield deaths also rose sharply as the conflict dragged on, with some months in late 2024 and 2025 seeing over 15,000 soldiers killed, equivalent to roughly 500 per day. This scale is unprecedented in modern Russian history, exceeding the combined death toll from all Soviet and Russian wars since World War II by more than eightfold. It also surpasses the number of US military personnel who died during the second world war.
Diplomatic Stalemate and Hardened Resolve
Despite the sheer magnitude of these losses, the data is unlikely to push Vladimir Putin toward a settlement. A person familiar with the president’s thinking reported that "Putin understands these numbers, and for him to now settle for anything less than everything he wants would feel like a betrayal of himself and the people." Senior Russian and Ukrainian negotiators are scheduled to meet in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday for the first US-brokered peace talks in nine months. Neither leader will attend; instead, both countries will send senior delegations, joined by Donald Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Witkoff said the negotiations would focus on "post-war security arrangement, de-escalation" and humanitarian issues. European governments worry the talks could extend to broader questions of European security, including Moscow’s demands for a reduction of NATO’s military presence in bordering countries. France’s foreign minister claimed Paris would participate, but the Kremlin subsequently denied that France would be represented. Previous negotiations have made little progress, with Moscow demanding that Ukraine withdraw from parts of the Donbas region it still controls.
