More than 400,000 Russians have been killed fighting in Ukraine since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, according to death certificates leaked from Russia’s own state statistics agency — the first hard count of a toll the Kremlin has spent nearly five years hiding.
The figures come from more than 11 million death certificates obtained by two hacking groups — Cyber Partisans, a Belarusian opposition-linked collective, and Silent Crow, a pro-Ukrainian operation — and shared with the Guardian and a small group of other news outlets. Of those records, 412,576 explicitly tie the death to the war, either through official cause-of-death codes or written references to combat and military operations.
Bloomberg, which examined the same material independently, counted almost 392,700 certificates explicitly linked to the war between 24 February 2022 and late August 2026. Silent Crow’s own, broader calculation — which also counts military deaths without an explicit cause — puts the total at about 450,000.
The two groups announced the breach on 1 November and published the data over the weekend. Rosstat, Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service, confirmed it had been hit by cyberattacks between 29 October and 1 November, but said it found no evidence its databases had been compromised or that confidential information had leaked.
The Guardian said it could not independently verify the authenticity of the entire dataset. But the numbers line up with every other serious estimate. British intelligence estimated in September that about 500,000 Russian soldiers had been killed. The independent Russian outlet Mediazona, working with the BBC’s Russian service, has identified nearly 286,000 of the dead by name — from official records, social-media obituaries and photographs of gravestones — and believes the true figure is closer to half a million.
“The data looks authentic, and it’s very rich,” said Janis Kluge, head of the Russia and Eurasia division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, who has studied the records. “This is the biggest leak of data when it comes to Russian casualties.”
Kluge warned the leaked count is almost certainly an undercount. Some soldiers remain missing. Others were never identified. And deaths are taking ever longer to reach the official records — the typical delay grew from about six weeks in late 2023 to more than four months by 2025. “We are probably at this time closer to 500,000 killed Russian soldiers than 400,000,” he said.
The records also show who is paying the price. In Buryatia, Tuva and Zabaykalsky Krai — three remote regions in eastern Russia bordering Mongolia — war deaths accounted for about a third of all deaths among men aged 18 to 49 between the invasion and mid-2024. In Moscow and St Petersburg, the equivalent figure was about one in ten. The army that invaded Ukraine was young; the one fighting now is not. In the first half of 2022, only 146 men aged 50 to 59 died of war-related causes. In the first six months of 2025, that number was more than 12,600 — over 16 per cent of all deaths in that age group. For men aged 18 to 29, the war was responsible for about two-thirds of all deaths in the same period.
The killing has accelerated, not slowed. Some of the deadliest months came in late 2024 and 2025, with more than 15,000 Russian soldiers killed in several months — roughly 500 a day. “In late 2024 and in 2025, you see that the numbers in many months are above 15,000 per month, and that’s higher than I think most estimates were,” Kluge said. “That’s 500 a day, above 500 a day. Certainly shocking.” October brought a record 54,000 Russian troops killed or seriously wounded, according to Ukrainian and Western intelligence.
The war itself shows no sign of ending. Russia has shifted to heavy bombardment of Ukrainian cities and power infrastructure, while Ukraine has answered with deep strikes of its own — including the largest drone attack on Moscow in two years.
Why does this leak matter beyond the numbers? The scale is staggering by any measure. In less than five years, Russian military deaths in Ukraine are estimated to have exceeded the combined death toll from all Soviet and Russian wars between the end of the Second World War and the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022 more than eightfold — and to have passed the number of US military personnel who died in the Second World War. For a country whose government made military casualty figures a state secret in 2015, and which has published no death toll since the invasion’s early months, the leak is the first time the public has seen the war’s cost written in the state’s own paperwork.
Whether the numbers change anything is another question. Senior Russian and Ukrainian negotiators meet in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday for the first US-brokered peace talks in nine months, with Donald Trump’s envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner expected to take part. But a person familiar with Vladimir Putin’s thinking told the Guardian the scale of the losses was likely to harden the Russian president’s resolve, not soften it: “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.”
On the Ukrainian side, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in February that at least 55,000 of his soldiers had been killed, with many more missing. Neither he nor Putin will attend the Abu Dhabi talks. The war, now approaching its fifth year, goes on — and the leaked records suggest its true cost, on the Russian side alone, is already far larger than the world knew.
