A trove of 11 million Russian death certificates — hacked from the state statistics agency Rosstat by Belarusian group Cyber Partisans and Ukrainian collective Silent Crow — contains 412,576 records explicitly linked to combat in Ukraine. The dataset, shared with the Guardian and other outlets, represents the most granular look at Russian wartime losses ever made public, in a country where military casualty figures are classified as state secrets. The numbers are consistent with but slightly below other estimates. British intelligence pegged Russian dead at roughly 500,000 as of September. Mediazona, the independent Russian outlet that has individually identified nearly 286,000 dead by name through obituaries and gravestones, estimates the true figure is closer to half a million. Janis Kluge of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, who has been analysing the data, says a six-month lag in death registration means the real current toll is probably closer to 500,000 than 400,000. The geographic distribution is brutally unequal. In Buryatia, Tuva, and Zabaykalsky Krai — remote, poor, heavily non-ethnic-Russian regions in eastern Siberia — war deaths accounted for roughly a third of all male deaths aged 18-49 between the invasion's start and mid-2024. In Moscow and St Petersburg, the figure was about 10%. The war's extraction follows a familiar colonial pattern: peripheral populations absorb the violence while the imperial core is shielded. The tempo is accelerating, not stabilizing. Kluge reports that multiple months in late 2024 and 2025 exceeded 15,000 dead per month — over 500 per day. That rate makes the current phase of the war deadlier per unit time than any previous period and dwarfs anything in Russia's post-WWII military history. Total Russian military deaths in Ukraine are now estimated to exceed the combined toll of all Soviet and Russian wars from 1945 to 2022 by a factor of eight. Rather than driving Moscow toward settlement, the scale of losses appears to be hardening Putin's position. A person familiar with his thinking told the Guardian that settling for less than full objectives would feel like a betrayal of the dead — classic sunk-cost escalation logic. This is the extractive trap in its purest form: the cost of the war becomes the argument for continuing it. Senior Russian and Ukrainian negotiators are due to meet in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday for US-brokered talks, with Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner expected to participate. Neither Putin nor Zelenskyy will attend. Witkoff framed the agenda as post-war security, de-escalation, and humanitarian issues. European governments are nervous the talks could extend to broader NATO posture questions — Moscow's longstanding demand for reduced allied military presence near its borders. The leak's political significance may outlast its statistical novelty. The numbers were already roughly known to Western intelligence. What changes is that they're now documentable at the individual certificate level, making them harder for the Kremlin to dismiss internally and externally. Whether that matters in a system where the decision-maker views casualties as proof of commitment rather than cause for retreat is the open question.
