Leaked Rosstat Files Point To About 400,000 Russian Deaths Fighting In Ukraine

What the files show

An internal Rosstat export covering 2021 through late August 2026 contains over 11 million death certificates with details such as residence, age, and place of death. Within that span, almost 392,700 certificates explicitly connect fatalities to the war, either through diagnostic coding or free text mentioning terms like "military operation," "shelling," or "drones."

On Nov. 1, the Belarusian pro-opposition group Cyber Partisans together with the Ukrainian hacker operation Silent Crow said they had hacked Rosstat, reaching about 25,000 computers and exfiltrating roughly 23 terabytes that contained details on Russian military losses. They provided the trove to Bloomberg News and a small number of other publications. Rosstat reported that, between Oct. 29 and Nov. 1, it had detected targeted intrusions against its systems, found no proof of database compromise or leaks of confidential data, and was bringing services back online after portions of its infrastructure were taken down. Rosstat did not respond to a request for comment.

People familiar with the Russian military said an estimate near 400,000 deaths is realistic. Silent Crow's own tally, which also counts non-combat fatalities and records lacking an explicit cause, puts the figure near 450,000. Independent counts likewise point to heavy losses: the Mediazona and BBC Russian project has identified 285,881 dead as of this month, and, drawing on Russia's probate registry, Mediazona and Meduza estimate fatalities at about 352,000 through December 2025.

Gaps and caveats in the count

Combat deaths are hard to record cleanly, so the dataset likely understates the true total. Some soldiers are listed as missing, some bodies remain unidentified, and others die later from war injuries that are not clearly tagged in the records. Some fatalities may be logged under other categories or not recorded at all.

There are technical notes too. Counts exclude 16 deaths that occurred before 2022 and 116 records without dates. Because the 2026 data is incomplete and omitted from some analyses, the totals probably fall short of reality, and the later months of 2025 likely undercount because death registrations lag.

In 8,858 records, the date of death recorded came after the certificate's date, so Bloomberg used the death date from the registry's original version. While independent cryptographic verification was not possible, Bloomberg's review found metadata consistent with a genuine export and no signs of fabrication. The leak aligns closely with official totals for 2021 and 2022, differing by 0.1 percent and 0.2 percent respectively.

It seems many deaths of young men are missing from the 2023 official statistics, likely in part because war-related fatalities can take months to be recorded. Rosstat has gradually stopped publishing many statistics since the 2022 invasion, which makes this trove a rare view into the war's domestic impact.

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Who is bearing the burden and how the trend shifted

The files show the war's toll widening across Russian society as the conflict dragged on. A relatively young army at the outset has drawn more heavily on older men over time, while poorer, more remote, and more ethnically diverse regions have shouldered a larger share of deaths than the major cities.

In the first half of 2022, 146 men aged 50 to 59 were recorded as dying from war-related causes, under 1 percent of all deaths in that cohort. By the first half of 2025, that rose to more than 12,600, accounting for over 16 percent of all deaths among Russian men in that age band. For men 18 to 29 in that same 2025 period, the war accounted for about two thirds of all deaths.

In the Siberian areas along the Mongolian border - the republics of Buryatia and Tuva and Zabaykalsky Krai - about one-third of deaths among men 18 to 49 from the invasion's outset through mid-2024 were logged as connected to the war. In Moscow and St. Petersburg, the share was roughly one in ten.

The body count accelerated after the early months as Russian units stalled in eastern Ukraine while Kyiv's defenses grew more effective. Separate reporting suggests 2026 has been especially costly for Russia. According to Ukraine and Western intelligence, October saw a record 54,000 Russian troops either killed or seriously wounded.

War context and recruitment pressure

The Kremlin has tightly controlled information on battlefield losses. In 2015, Vladimir Putin made losses incurred "in peacetime during special operations" or during war a state secret. Because this year has brought no major battlefield gains, Moscow has intensified bombing of Ukrainian cities and critical infrastructure to try to sap Kyiv's morale, while seeking to convince the US to push Ukraine to surrender additional territory to bring the war to a close. Officials from Russia, Ukraine and the US plan to convene in Abu Dhabi this week to talk through the terms of a possible ceasefire.

Recruitment is a growing constraint. Russia has offered sign-up bonuses and other benefits to attract recruits, though some payments are being cut as pressure on public finances builds.

The bottom line: a longer war with higher personnel costs and delayed reporting means more strain on Russia's labor pool and budget, and more uncertainty for energy, defense, and broader emerging market risk. This leak does not settle the casualty debate, but it quantifies a trend investors have to price - a grinding conflict that remains costly to prosecute.

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