Hacker groups Silent Crow and "Cyberpartisans BY", who claimed to have hacked Russia's Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat), have released new estimates of Russia's losses in the war against Ukraine. According to their calculations, the allegedly stolen registers contain information about hundreds of thousands of deaths related to combat operations and their consequences.

The hackers published the results of their analysis on November 7. The dataset they call Rosstat data covers the period from the beginning of the full-scale invasion in February 2022 until the end of August 2026.

According to Silent Crow's calculations, the total number of deaths they classified as war-related is 450,100. "Cyberpartisans BY", who applied stricter criteria, counted 393,881 fatalities.

In their research, Silent Crow identified several categories. The largest one is 356,056 death certificates with the Y36 code in the international classification of diseases, which denotes military operations. Another 38,229 cases were identified by code Y89.1 or text descriptions of combat circumstances of death, and 18,291 by a separate mark on death during military operations without a corresponding cause code.

Together, these three categories cover 412,576 cases. However, the Y36 code does not automatically permit distinguishing fallen military personnel from civilian victims of hostilities.

Silent Crow's broader estimate also included 575 deaths marked as terrorism acts, 13,671 deaths of persons registered in Russia in occupied territories or in Ukraine without a specified cause, and 14,160 non-combat military deaths — including due to illness, road accidents, and suicides.

Therefore, 440,982 cases were classified by the group as documentarily established categories. Another 9,118 deaths were added using a calculated method based on certificates without a specified cause. This portion is an estimate, not a confirmed count of fatalities.

The published statistics also contain a regional breakdown. According to Silent Crow, the largest share of deceased — 21.7% — lived in the Volga Federal District of Russia. Then come the Central District with 16.9%, the Southern District with 15.3%, and the Siberian District with 14.7%.

By place of death, the largest share of certificates — 54.9% — is in territories designated in the Russian accounting system as the "Donetsk People's Republic", that is, the occupied part of the Donetsk Oblast of Ukraine. In another 17% of cases, the place of death is not indicated.

According to the authors of the study, men constitute 99.4% of the cases in the formed sample. The most common age group is 35–44 years old.

The hackers also analyzed the rate of incoming new records. According to their calculations, over the last six full months, an average of 18,280 certificates per month were added to the database — 26% more than in the similar previous period.

At the same time, months can pass between the actual date of death and its registration. Given this delay, Silent Crow estimates the possible number of deaths as of August 28 at approximately 504,000. This is a statistical model of the group, not the number of directly identified certificates.

For comparison, the independent media outlet Mediazona, together with the Russian service of BBC and volunteers, had as of November 6 identified the names of 285,881 Russian military personnel killed in the war against Ukraine. This list is compiled from open sources, so it does not cover all the killed.

Meanwhile, Meduza reported that together with Mediazona they gained access to the data published by hackers and began verifying its authenticity and completeness. Journalists are to ascertain, among other things, whether the records were deliberately altered.

Rosstat itself confirmed cyberattacks on its information resources that took place from October 29 to November 1, but denied any compromise of databases and leakage of protected information.

There is currently no independent confirmation of the reliability of the entire published dataset. Therefore, these figures cannot be considered definitively established losses of the Russian army. Furthermore, they do not account for all the missing, wounded, and killed whose deaths were not recorded in the respective registers.

Based on materials: Silent Crow and "Cyberpartisans BY", Meduza, Mediazona