War in Ukraine: hackers reveal the deaths of 400,000 Russians in combat

One of Vladimir Putin's countless secrets has just been revealed. Belarusian opposition hackers “CyberPartisan” and the pro-Ukrainian collective “SilentCrow” managed to penetrate the internal system of the Russian Federal State Statistics Service, Rosstat. They reveal the deaths of around 400,000 Russians in the war in Ukraine. Highly sensitive data, which the Bloomberg agency revealed on November 8.

Since February 24, 2022 and until August 28, 2026 precisely, 393,881 Russians have lost their lives in the war in Ukraine, according to CyberPartisan. The methodology explains following the codings written on the various death certificates or brief texts mentioning terms such as “military operation”, “bombing” or “drones”.

11 million death certificates analyzed

The SilentCrow group also published data, which differs slightly from that of their associates due to different calculation methods. According to data broadcast on their Telegram channel, 426,822 people died under the code Y36 “war operations” and Y89.1, in other words “combat formulation without code”. They add around 25,000 deaths which are not linked to combat (road accident, illness, etc.) as well as without a declared cause. 99.4% are men and the majority of the dead are between 30 and 50 years old.

For six months, the two groups of hackers infiltrated 25,000 positions at the Rosstat agency and extracted 23 terabytes of data, allowing them to analyze 11 million death certificates, they announced on November 1. A few days later, Rosstat said it detected targeted cyberattacks against its systems between October 29 and November 1. However, they found no evidence that its databases had been compromised or that confidential information had been disclosed.

In times of war, it remains essential to distinguish between confirmed deaths and total losses. According to the Lukashenko opposition group CyberPartisans, the total number of personnel losses in military conflicts is, as a rule, 3 to 5 times higher than the number of confirmed deaths. These figures illustrate the difficulty for the Kremlin to preserve the lives of its soldiers in the Ukrainian quagmire, which is now having a considerable impact on Russian society. Faced with the cost of war, several regions have also announced the reduction or even the end of compensation linked to the loss of a loved one at the front.

Figures difficult to obtain

If one file in three does not specify the place of death, pro-Ukrainian hackers SilentCrow reveal that 33.3% of soldiers lost their lives in the Donetsk People's Republic. The second oblast which saw the most Russian soldiers die is that of Kursk. The Kremlin had until now made sure to prevent Russian losses in Ukraine from being made public. A year after the invasion of Crimea, in 2015, he had already signed a presidential decree classifying as a “state secret” any information on military losses occurring “in times of peace, during special operations” or in times of war.

Following the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Russian Parliament adopted an arsenal of legislation specifically targeting speech about the conflict. Article 207.3 of the Penal Code provides for up to 15 years in prison for any “false” information on the progress of the war or the losses suffered that does not come from official press releases from the Russian Defense Ministry. Several organizations or intelligence services have each attempted to quantify Russian losses on the Ukrainian front.