A leaked database from Russia’s state statistics agency shows almost 392,700 death certificates were issued in relation to the war in Ukraine between February 24, 2022, when Russia launched its full invasion of the country, and late August 2026.
Some deaths were registered over a year after they occurred, Bloomberg found.
Putin in a Meeting. Russian Federation Photo.
Putin in 2025 Russian Government Photo
Of the over 11 million death certificates in the cache, those with war-related causes used official codes or mentions of combat, bombardment or drone attacks. Some of the deaths may have been civilians who died in strikes on Russia.
Moscow has not released an overall number of military deaths since 2022, Le Monde reported on November 10.
Russia’s Statistics Agency Denies Protected Data Leak
The Belarusian opposition group Cyber Partisans and Ukrainian group Silent Crow said on November 1 that they had hacked the Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) and stolen around 23 terabytes of data. “Most of the material is made up of databases, internal documents, service information and data from employees’ work computers,” Silent Crow said on Telegram, according to Stars and Stripes.
Rosstat acknowledged targeted cyberattacks between October 29 and November 1 but denied that its databases were breached or that protected information was leaked.
The numbers in the files differed by more than one percent from the numbers Rosstat released for each year from 2021 to 2023.
Bloomberg said its review “did not find indicators of fabrication,” although it could not conclusively establish the database’s authenticity.
Meduza and Mediazona said they were examining the dataset’s completeness and possible manipulation.
War-Related Deaths in Ukraine
The Guardian reported 412,576 certificates linked to the war. “We are probably at this time closer to 500,000 killed Russian soldiers than 400,000,” Janis Kluge from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs told the newspaper.
Cyber Partisans said 393,881 records were included up to August 27 using codes or mentions of war-related activity.
They noted that the count might include civilians or victims of other conflicts.
Silent Crow said they had included deaths of military personnel not related to combat.
Using the high proportion of men in deaths with unknown causes close to the front, they said the number ranged from 444,716 to 450,100, Novaya Gazeta Europe reported.
Delayed Registrations
Over 2,500 deaths related to the war in 2025 were only added to the register in August 2026.
The median registration time increased from around six weeks to more than four months, between the second half of 2023 and 2025.
“Russian officials have also tried to misrepresent the total number of deceased service members by registering them as missing in action,” analysts from the Institute for the Study of War and the Critical Threats Project noted.
Yulia Yazikova’s husband stopped contacting home five months after enlisting in May 2023. His military unit went to court to declare him missing in June 2024. “I don’t know anything, I don’t have any information at all about what happened there,” she told Mediazona in 2025.
Moscow’s Last Published Death Toll
“Our losses to date are 5,937 dead,” Russia’s then-Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu claimed in a televised interview in September 2022. Moscow has announced no official death tolls since then
Back in 2015, President Vladimir Putin issued a presidential decree to expand state secrecy around military deaths “in peacetime during special operations.”
By November 6, 285,881 named deaths of Russian military personnel had been identified by Mediazona, BBC News Russian and volunteers from sources like obituaries and photos of graves.
However, Mediazona stressed that the list is not comprehensive, as not all deaths are publicly reported.
Using inheritance records, Mediazona and Meduza estimated that there were 352,000 deaths of Russian soldiers aged between 18 and 59 by December 2025.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that between 400,000 and 450,000 Russian troops had died from February 2022 to June 2026.
This is out of around 1.4 million battlefield casualties. “Since World War II, no major power has suffered anywhere near these numbers of casualties or fatalities in any war,” the researchers said in their July report.
American, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators met in Abu Dhabi on November 10 for their first U.S.-mediated talks since February, Reuters reported.
“Russia is suffering record manpower losses on the front, both daily and weekly,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his address on Monday evening.
About the Author: Georgia Gilholy
Georgia Gilholy is a journalist based in the United Kingdom who has been published in Newsweek, The Times of Israel, and the Spectator. Gilholy writes about international politics, culture, and education.
