FT Analysis of Leaked Rosstat Data Puts Russia's War-Related Deaths at At Least 450,000, With the True Toll Possibly Near 550,000
An analysis of population data said to have been leaked from Russia's Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) shows that at least 450,000 war-related Russian deaths were recorded between the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and this past summer, the Financial Times reported on November 13.
The data come from more than 11 million death-certificate records that the Belarusian hacker group Cyber Partisans and the Ukrainian group Silent Crow say they stole. The FT analysis found that about 410,000 of the deaths were directly classified as conflict-related, most of them soldiers but including some civilians; analysts then identified roughly 12,000 more dead men of fighting age in frontline areas such as Pokrovsk by examining the profiles, places and status of the deceased.
The report noted extensive delays in death registration - deaths from the 2022 siege of Mariupol, for example, were registered only this year - so the true figure may be higher than the leaked data itself: by early August, actual deaths could have reached about 550,000, and on a simple extrapolation could reach about 650,000 by the end of this year. The data also show the average age of the war dead rising from 34 in 2022 to 40 last year.
Neither Russia nor Ukraine publishes its casualty figures, and Russia stopped releasing official combat-loss statistics in September 2022. Rosstat has acknowledged a cyberattack on its systems between October 29 and November 1 but denies its database was breached or data leaked; the leaked data's authenticity has not been independently verified. A name-by-name list compiled by Mediazona and the BBC Russian Service from public records had confirmed about 286,000 dead soldiers as of November 8.
(Source: Financial Times)
Source: Financial Times
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：位于保加利亚普罗夫迪夫的俄罗斯军人公墓（资料图）。照片为公共领域作品，经 Wikimedia Commons。 / Photo: The Russian Military Cemetery in Plovdiv, Bulgaria (file photo). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
