Leak talks about 450,000 dead Russians
Russian statistics agency Rosstat has come under cyber attack, which hacker groups claim has led to the leaking of Russian military casualty figures.
Quick Look
- Hacker groups Cyber Partisans and Silent Crow claim to have stolen Russian databases from Rosstat.
- They claim that the material shows up to 450,000 Russian servicemen killed since February 2022, a figure that could not be verified.
AI-generated summary
Why It Matters
Russia does not publish official statistics on its military losses in Ukraine. The data from the hacking groups has not been able to be verified by independent parties.
The Russian statistics agency Rosstat has admitted that it was subjected to a cyber attack between October 29 and November 1, but not that it led to any losses. If you are to believe the report published by two hacker groups, it is not true.
Regime-critical Belarusian Cyber Partisans and pro-Ukrainian Silent Crow claim that within that time frame, among other things, they came across data from Russian death records. These speak of nearly 394,000 killed Russian military personnel since February 2022 according to Cyber Partisans, or just over 450,000 according to Silent Crow.
The higher figure includes servicemen who died from things other than direct combat and those whose cause of death was not noted. However, injured, missing or foreign mercenaries are not included, so "the total combat losses are therefore significantly higher", writes Silent Crow in its presentation.
The hacker groups write on Telegram that they have come across a total of approximately 23 terabytes of information, primarily databases, internal documents, service information and data from employees' work computers.
Although it is almost exclusively men, dying in combat is therefore Russia's fourth most common cause of death. However, Russia does not publish statistics on combat losses and the leaked data could not be verified.
The most commonly cited information in this context is otherwise the ongoing review by the news site Mediazona and the Russian-language BBC, which is based on open sources, as well as studies of the excess mortality among men and estate records in Russia. According to it, there are close to 286,000 killed military personnel, and with an estimate of the dark figure up to 352,000.
Cyber Partisans and Silent Crow have previously hacked Russian and Belarusian targets, including the high-profile attack on state-owned airline Aeroflot last summer. In several cases, they enter into collaborations with various other dissident groups.
In the current case, the military losses have been put in relation to the illegally conquered lands in Ukraine. According to their estimate, each square kilometer would have claimed the lives of 6.2 Russian servicemen or roughly 1 dead soldier per 16 hectares.
Open Questions
- Can the leaked data be verified by independent sources?
- What exact security flaws were exploited at Rosstat?
