Hackers affiliated with Belarusian opposition and Ukrainian collectives breached Russia’s Rosstat statistics agency and obtained millions of death certificates, revealing previously undisclosed information about military casualties in the Ukraine war. The leaked dataset contains more than 11 million death records, with over 412,000 explicitly linked to combat-related fatalities through official cause-of-death coding or written references to military operations. The data was announced on November 1 and subsequently shared with international media outlets including the Guardian.
While the Russian government has not published official casualty figures since early in the conflict, treating military losses as classified information, the leaked records provide an unprecedented window into the scale of Russian wartime deaths. The figures align closely with other independent estimates, including British intelligence assessments from September indicating approximately 500,000 Russian soldiers killed since the invasion began. Janis Kluge of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs characterized the dataset as authentic and noted that accounting for reporting delays and missing persons, the actual toll likely approaches 500,000 rather than the documented 412,576.
The data reveals significant regional disparities in war-related deaths, with poorer eastern Russian regions experiencing disproportionate losses. In Buryatia, Tuva and Zabaykalsky Krai, war-related fatalities accounted for approximately one-third of all male deaths aged 18 to 49, compared to roughly 10 percent in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Analysis of monthly death records shows particularly heavy casualties in late 2024 and 2025, with several months exceeding 15,000 deaths.
Meanwhile, senior Russian and Ukrainian negotiators are scheduled to meet in Abu Dhabi this week for peace talks mediated by the United States, marking the first such discussions in nine months. The negotiations, which neither Putin nor Zelenskyy will attend in person, are expected to address security arrangements, de-escalation, and humanitarian concerns. Previous negotiation efforts have made limited progress, with Moscow maintaining demands for Ukrainian withdrawal from contested areas of the Donbas region.
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