More than 400,000 Russians have reportedly died since President Vladimir Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly five years ago — a figure that exceeds the combined Russian death toll from every war fought since World War II, according to leaked government records.
Belarusian and Ukrainian hackers opposed to the Kremlin uncovered 412,576 death certificates linked specifically to the conflict. The documents had been compiled by Rosstat, Russia’s state statistics agency.
The leak offers an unprecedented glimpse into the Kremlin’s own accounting of wartime losses and underscores the enormous human cost the invasion has imposed on Russia.
The reported figure is nine times higher than the total number of Soviet and Russian military deaths recorded across all wars since World War II.
The data was assembled by Cyber Partisans, a Belarusian opposition-linked hacking group, and Silent Crow, a Ukrainian collective. The groups said they searched through roughly 11 million Rosstat death certificates after breaching the agency’s systems on Nov. 1.
Rosstat acknowledged that its systems had been hacked but denied that the attackers obtained any sensitive information.
Still, the figures broadly correspond with estimates from military analysts and British intelligence agencies, which have documented the heavy losses caused by Moscow’s costly battlefield strategy.
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The numbers also appear consistent with an analysis released last week by the Russian independent outlet Mediazona, which counted nearly 286,000 military personnel killed while serving in Ukraine.
Mediazona said the actual death toll was likely closer to 500,000 — a figure reached several days later by The Economist in a separate assessment.
The reports emerged shortly after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had suffered more than 54,000 casualties in October alone, making it the deadliest month for Russian forces since the invasion began.
The scale of the losses has intensified pressure on Putin to order another nationwide mobilization. Analysts say the Russian president has sought to avoid such a move because of the widespread public backlash that followed the previous draft.
Russian and Ukrainian representatives are now taking part in trilateral peace negotiations with the United States in Abu Dhabi, where officials are working toward a possible agreement to end the war.
President Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, said the discussions would center on a “post-war security arrangement” and “de-escalation.”
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