Hacking groups Cyber Partisans BY and Silent Crow have announced that they breached the systems of Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service, Rosstat, and stole approximately 23 terabytes of data. The stolen information includes internal documents, demographic and economic statistics, as well as information on Russian losses in the war against Ukraine.
Based on the published data, the hackers conducted their own calculations. According to Cyber Partisans BY, at least 393,881 Russian citizens had died between the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 and August 27, 2026. Silent Crow puts the figure higher, at 450,100 deaths. The discrepancy stems from differences in methodology. Cyber Partisans BY counted deaths attributed to military operations or their consequences.
Silent Crow’s calculations also include non-combat military deaths, deaths resulting from terrorist attacks, and cases recorded in Russia in which people died in occupied territories or Ukraine, but the exact cause of death is unknown.
Russia has not published official statistics on combat losses since September 2022. Since 2024, Rosstat has also stopped publishing annual data on causes of death, making independent assessments of the war’s demographic impact even more difficult.
As of November 8, the joint database maintained by BBC Russian and Mediazona contained approximately 286,000 names of Russian military personnel killed. However, the list is incomplete, particularly for the final months of the war. A study by Meduza and Mediazona based on inheritance registry data estimated the death toll at approximately 350,000 by the end of 2025. The hackers’ figures are consistent with previous independent estimates, but this does not yet confirm the accuracy of every number.
The main challenge surrounding these figures is not just the scale of the death toll, but how to trust the calculations when official statistics have been unavailable for a long time. The hackers’ published figures may help fill the gap, but it is too early to consider them definitive estimates before their origin and completeness have been verified.
The substantial differences between the various estimates demonstrate how important it is to understand who is included in the statistics and under what conditions. Combining combat losses, non-combat deaths, and missing persons into a single figure can change the perception of the human cost of the war.
The value of this material, therefore, lies not only in the potentially new figures. If the data are verified, they could help provide a more comprehensive picture, although some cases will remain unresolved even then.
