No official report has ever been communicated on Russian combat losses. But the war in Ukraine may have already caused the deaths of nearly 400,000 Russian fighters, according to new data as of August 27, obtained during a computer hack. Indeed, two groups of hackers claim to have exploited a breach of the Rosstat site, which centralizes the statistical data of the Russian state, in order to obtain these confidential elements. The CyberPartisans (close to the Belarusian opposition) and Silent Crow (formerly CyberWar and Cyber Legions UA, pro-Ukrainian) have already launched several cyberattacks in recent months, targeting for example Rostelecom or Aeroflot.
On November 1, a message in Belarusian was posted on the state portal, accompanied by the logos of the two organizations. They then claimed to have downloaded several terabytes of data, including “information relating to Russia's military losses during the war”. The Rosstat press service confirmed having been the target of a computer attack, to the Russian media RBC. But he denied any data leak.
Six days later, the Silent Crow group explained that the hacked databases contained information from the population census, as well as data on the causes of death of citizens. Two codes from the international classification of diseases (ICD-10) have particularly caught the attention of hackers: Y36, for “acts of war”, and Y89.1, for “aftereffects of acts of war”. The hackers were able to establish 394,000 deaths for the Y36 and Y89.1 codes alone, and 450,000 by integrating other mentions ("deaths in military operations", "terrorist act", "registered in Russia but died in occupied territory", "deaths of soldiers not linked to combat", etc.).
The database does not include any names, only identifiers. However, it includes addresses and birth information, which allows potential identification by crossing the bases. This method, for example, allowed the “Russian officers killed in Ukraine” project to confirm the death of Vladimir Podolyak, a colonel in the Russian army killed in 2024 in the Melitopol district, older brother of Mykhaïlo Podolyak, advisor to the Ukrainian president.
Franceinfo was able to obtain and consult a sample of raw data obtained during this hacking of the Rosstat databases, as well as an extract from this list. The cause of death column sometimes mentions injuries. On March 23, a man from Chelyabinsk, in western Siberia, died at the age of 21 in the Kursk region: "Y36.2 [corresponding to a "war event involving other explosions and fragments"], traumatic hemothorax, injury to an unspecified organ of the rib cage, explosions during military operations."
Military losses are classified as a “state secret” in Russia
The two groups posted a summary of the data online. Their site allows you to visualize, among other things, the origin of the soldiers, the geographical distribution of deaths, as well as their breakdown by age, by year. We learn that 135,000 of these deaths were aged 35 to 44, and that the war is more and more deadly over the years: 18,880 deaths in 2022, 42,365 in 223, 109,680 in 2024, 182,260 in 2025. Rosstat data still mentioned 39,300 deaths this year. This figure could reach between 190,000 and 225,000 in 2026, depending on different scenarios, because registration in the databases is carried out with a lag of several months.
More than half of the deaths (55%) were recorded in the Donetsk territories, the main scene of clashes between the belligerents, but the place of death is not recorded in 17% of cases. Finally, these data only compile deaths and do not take into account soldiers who were missing or too seriously injured to be sent back to the front. The total number of casualties in armed conflicts "is generally three to five times higher than the number of deaths", say the CyberPartisans. Since the beginning of the invasion, war has become the fourth leading cause of death in Russia.
“This is a historically unprecedented document of Russian losses.”
CyberPartisans
at franceinfo
“These are not estimates, analyzes or speculations, but real data from Russian databases, which experts can examine and analyze completely independently,” commented the CyberPartisans group to franceinfo. The collective claims to have other information, particularly on Russian exports and imports, “elements that the Russian authorities have been hiding since 2022”, and promises future other revelations.
