After the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Russian Parliament adopted a legislative arsenal targeting speech about the conflict. Article 207.3 of the Criminal Code provides for up to 15 years in prison for any information deemed “false” about the course of the war or the losses, whenever it does not come from official communiqués of the Ministry of Defense.
If confirmed, these figures contradict the policy of silence imposed by Moscow on the human toll of the conflict. Until now, the Kremlin had avoided making Russian losses in Ukraine public.
Among the hardest-hit territories, Kursk Oblast ranks second for the number of Russian soldiers killed. The full ranking of regions is not detailed in the information made public.
Belarusian and Ukrainian hackers say they breached the internal network of Rosstat, the Russian federal statistics service, and extracted casualty figures that the Kremlin had until now kept secret. They report about 400,000 Russians killed in the war in Ukraine. The two groups say they infiltrated 25,000 of the agency’s workstations over six months and extracted 23 terabytes of data. That volume notably allowed them to review 11 million death certificates, they announced on November 1.
They add about 25,000 deaths with no direct link to the fighting — road accidents, illness, or other causes — as well as deaths with no stated cause.
According to these data, 99.4% of the dead are men. Most are between 30 and 50 years old.