How the data surfaced

The russia war death toll has remained a state secret for most of the invasion, but a massive leak from the state statistics agency now offers an unusually detailed picture. The dataset was obtained by the Belarusian opposition-linked hacker group Cyber Partisans and the Ukrainian hacking collective Silent Crow, according to the report of the leak.

• •The two hacking groups announced the breach on 1 November and published the data over the weekend.
• •The leak contains more than 11m death certificates, including details of the deceased's age, place of residence and location of death.
• •The data was later shared with the Guardian and a small group of other media outlets.

Rosstat confirmed it had been hacked but denied that any sensitive information had been obtained.

What the numbers show

Within the trove, 412,576 death certificates explicitly linked fatalities to the war through cause-of-death codes or written references to combat, according to the leaked data. The Guardian could not independently verify the authenticity of the entire dataset.

The regional breakdown points to a heavy unevenness in who is dying. Between the start of the invasion and mid-2024:

• •In Buryatia, Tuva and Zabaykalsky Krai, war-related fatalities accounted for about a third of all deaths among men aged 18 to 49.
• •In Moscow and St Petersburg, the equivalent figure was about 10%.

The scale of the losses is drawn into sharper relief by historical comparisons. Russian military deaths in Ukraine in under five years are estimated to exceed the combined death toll from all Soviet and Russian wars between the end of the second world war and the start of the full-scale invasion more than eightfold. The leaked death figure also exceeds the number of US military personnel who died during the second world war.

Other tallies point the same direction. British intelligence estimated in September that about 500,000 Russian soldiers had been killed since the start of the invasion. Mediazona has identified by name nearly 286,000 Russian military personnel killed in Ukraine and estimates the true toll is closer to half a million.

Expert assessment

Janis Kluge, head of the Russia and Eurasia division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, examined the material and judged it credible.

He called it the biggest leak of data when it comes to Russian casualties. Because there is typically about a six-month delay between deaths occurring and their entry into official records, he said, the recorded figures lag behind reality. Taking that delay into account, he concluded: "We are probably at this time closer to 500,000 killed Russian soldiers than 400,000".

The monthly figures in the dataset also exceeded most existing estimates. Several months in late 2024 and 2025 each saw more than 15,000 Russian soldiers killed, equivalent to roughly 500 a day, according to Kluge. "That's 500 a day, above 500 a day. Certainly shocking," he said.

Talks amid the losses

Senior Russian and Ukrainian negotiators were due to meet in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday for the first US-brokered peace talks between them in nine months. Neither Vladimir Putin nor Volodymyr Zelenskyy will attend; both countries will send senior delegations, and Donald Trump's envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are also expected to take part. Witkoff said in a post on X the negotiations would focus on "post-war security arrangement, de-escalation" and humanitarian issues.

Previous negotiations made little progress, with Moscow demanding that Ukraine withdraw from the parts of the Donbas region it still controls. European governments expressed concern the talks could extend to broader European security questions, including Moscow's longstanding demands for a reduction of Nato's military presence in countries bordering Russia. The attendance question itself remains unsettled: France's foreign minister said Paris would participate in the negotiations, but the Kremlin subsequently denied that France would be represented.

A person familiar with Putin's thinking said the scale of losses is likely to harden his resolve rather than push him towards a settlement. "Putin understands these numbers, and for him to now settle for anything less than everything he wants would feel like a betrayal," the person said.

Russian authorities have not published a death toll since the early months of the invasion, and military casualty figures remain a state secret.