Hackers exposed the numbers Putin tried to hide: Over 400,000 Russians killed in the war

Hackers breached the database of the Russian statistics agency Rosstat and revealed that over 412,000 Russians have been killed in the war in Ukraine. The data, published in The Guardian, shows a spike in the number of deaths in certain months to over 15,000 per month.

More than 400,000 Russians have been killed in the war in Ukraine since the invasion in February 2022, according to secret government documents exposed by a cyberattack on the Russian statistics agency Rosstat. The data, published in The Guardian, reveals for the first time the enormous scale of Russian military losses, after years in which the Kremlin avoided publishing official figures. The information was uncovered by two hacker groups: Cyber Partisans, linked to the Belarusian opposition, and the Ukrainian Silent Crow. Analysis of a database of over 11 million death certificates shows that 412,576 certificates were explicitly linked to the war. According to expert Janis Kluge, the real number may approach 500,000 dead. The data reveals deep disparities: in remote and poor regions of eastern Russia, about a third of deaths of men aged 18 to 49 were war-related, compared to about 10% in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The disclosure comes ahead of a round of US-mediated peace talks expected to open in Abu Dhabi.