Hackers claim vast Rosstat death leak

Two hacker groups say they breached Russia’s federal statistics agency and obtained internal data suggesting that hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens have been killed in the war against Ukraine.

According to Euronews, Kiberpartizany BY and Silent Crow claim to have taken about 23 terabytes of data from Rosstat, Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service. The material, they say, includes internal demographic records, economic statistics and information tied to wartime deaths. Using that data, the groups produced their own estimates of Russian losses.

Kiberpartizany BY said that as of 27 August 2026, at least 393,881 Russian citizens had been killed in the war. Silent Crow put the figure higher, at 450,100. The gap matters. It is not necessarily evidence that one number is false; Euronews reported that the groups used different counting methods. One counted deaths explicitly linked to military action or its consequences. The other included additional categories, including non-combat military deaths, deaths labelled as terrorist acts, and deaths of people registered in Russia but who died in occupied territories or in Ukraine without a clearly established cause.

What is established, for now, is narrower than the numbers themselves. The groups claim the breach happened. They claim the data came from Rosstat. Independent verification is still in progress.

That verification matters because Russia has sharply limited public visibility into the human toll of the war. Euronews noted that Moscow has not released official combat-loss statistics since September 2022, and that Rosstat stopped publishing annual cause-of-death data from 2024. In a system that has become less transparent, a leak of internal mortality records could be unusually consequential — if authentic and sufficiently complete.

Euronews reported that Meduza and Mediazona have obtained access to the published data and started checking both authenticity and completeness. That is not a formality. Internal records can still misclassify deaths, and Rosstat’s databases do not fully capture people still listed as missing, some of whom may later be declared dead. A leaked state dataset may be revealing without being definitive.

The estimates also sit within a range already suggested by independent reporting. Euronews said the BBC Russian Service and Mediazona’s name-by-name database contained around 286,000 identified dead Russian servicemen as of 8 November, while a joint Meduza-Mediazona study based on inheritance registry analysis estimated roughly 350,000 Russian military deaths by the end of 2025.

If the Rosstat material proves genuine, it would not end the argument over Russia’s losses. It would change the argument from whether the state knows, to what exactly it has been recording.