Given Russia’s penchant to lie about literally everything, observers have long speculated on what the actually death toll is for Russia’s illegal war of territorial aggression in Ukraine. Two hacking groups now say they’ve plucked the answer from Russian military computers: some 450,000 Russians killed.
Hacker groups Belarusian Cyberpartisans and Silent Crow, which claimed responsibility for a cyberattack on Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat), said on Nov. 7 that leaked death records indicate between 394,000 and 450,000 people fighting on Russia’s side or otherwise linked to the war have died since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The groups said they obtained the records from Rosstat’s internal Demography database, containing information from death certificates registered between February 2022 and August 2026.
Belarusian Cyberpartisans, a group of anonymous hacktivists opposing the regime of Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, estimated at least 393,881 deaths based on records explicitly identifying military operations as the cause.
Silent Crow published a higher estimate of up to 450,100 deaths, using a broader methodology that also included non-combat deaths of military personnel and certain deaths recorded without a specified cause.
If the 450,000 number is correct, that would put Russian losses at more than 32 times the official Soviet losses of 13,833 in the invasion of Afghanistan. And with traditional killed-vs-wounded ratios of 3-to-1 or 4-to-1, that puts Russian total casualties well over a million.
Nor do things seem to be getting better for Russia, as they just hit 2,980 Russian troops killed or seriously wounded in one day, a new record. Also, for the last two months Ukraine has regained more territory from Russia than it lost.
Given the mounting losses and Ukraine systemic dismantling of Russia’s oil and gas industry, as well as large swathes of its military production infrastructure, you have to wonder if Russia’s famous stoicism will finally reach its limits over Vlad’s Three Day Military Operation…
