Russia’s state statistics agency, Rosstat, recorded 393,881 to 450,100 dead on Russia’s side in the war through late August, two hacker groups that broke into its systems, Cyber Partisans and Silent Crow, claim. Their figures cannot be independently verified. They sit well above the number of dead soldiers journalists have named from public sources, and below expert estimates of the real toll.

Russia does not publish its war dead, so every count has been pieced together from outside, from obituaries and graves or from Ukraine’s battlefield estimates. Records kept inside the Russian state offer a rare check on those numbers. The check comes as Russia’s losses keep climbing: October was its costliest month of the full-scale war by Ukraine’s count, while each square kilometer it takes costs it more soldiers than before.

Ukraine’s General Staff puts Russia’s killed and wounded at about 1.6 million, and it counted 16,130 in the first week of November alone, its highest weekly figure of the war.

Two hacker groups, two counts from the same records

Rosstat’s website went down on the night of 1 November. Belarusian hacker group Cyber Partisans says it took about 10 terabytes of data in what its spokesperson Zmitser Shchyhelski called a strategic cyber operation, Radio Liberty’s Belarusian service Svaboda reported. Silent Crow, another hacker group, published its own count from the same records.

The Cyber Partisans’ count, at least 393,881 dead on Russia’s side from 2022 to 27 August 2026, includes only records whose cause of death names war. These are the international disease codes for operations of war and their consequences, or a cause written out as combat.

Silent Crow arrives at 450,100 through 28 August, its own site shows. It casts a wider net, adding 14,160 non-combat deaths of servicemen and 13,671 people registered in Russia who died in occupied territory with no cause given. More than half of the dead whose place of death is recorded died in Russian-occupied parts of Donetsk Oblast.

Both counts cover only deaths that entered Russia’s civil registries. The wounded, the missing, and foreign mercenaries are not in them. The war code does not separate soldiers from civilians, Silent Crow notes, so a share of the dead are residents of shelled towns, though 99.4% of those it counted are men.

How the hackers’ counts compare with other tallies

Working with volunteers and Russian outlet Mediazona, the BBC Russian Service has named 285,023 Russian soldiers killed in the full-scale invasion as of 30 October. Experts estimate its list captures 45% to 55% of the dead, putting the real toll at 518,224 to 633,384, the BBC said.

Cyber Partisans argue their figure fits Ukraine’s far larger count of Russian losses. Total losses, which include the wounded, disabled, and missing, usually run three to five times the number of dead, the group noted.

Russia lost more troops in the first week of November than in any other week of its full-scale war, Ukraine’s General Staff said on 8 November. The new high follows two daily records, and Ukraine’s drone force commander sees Russia feeding even more men into the fight. Germany’s defense minister says the losses are buying Moscow nothing on the ground.

Russia keeps throwing infantry at Ukraine’s defenses in Donbas and the south, day after day. Moscow shows no sign of easing off: its 2027 budget sets aside two rubles for the army for every one spent on welfare, schools, and hospitals. Diplomacy is moving at the same time. The first three-way talks between the US, Ukraine, and Russia since February are due in Abu Dhabi next week. Until Russia agrees to stop, the price of its war is counted in soldiers, week after week.

A Russian regiment a day, by Ukraine’s count

Russian forces lost 16,130 troops killed and wounded from 1 to 7 November, the General Staff wrote. That averages more than 2,300 a day, or nearly a hundred an hour. Each day’s toll equals an average Russian motorized rifle regiment, it added. The figures are Ukraine’s estimates and cannot be independently verified.

The General Staff put the blame on Russia’s commanders. They keep sending soldiers into “senseless ‘meat’ assaults,” it said, while Ukraine’s Defense Forces defend the country “methodically and effectively.”

The weekly record caps a run of daily ones. On 1 November alone, Ukraine’s forces took out 2,500 Russian troops, the most in a single day of the full-scale war, the General Staff reported. That beat the 2,250 of 21 October, the costliest day of a record month in which Russia lost 54,400 troops.

The heaviest fighting comes near Kostiantynivka

On 7 November, Ukraine’s troops recorded 199 clashes along the front, the General Staff’s morning update showed. The heaviest pressure came near Kostiantynivka in Donetsk Oblast, with 23 Russian assaults. Russian troops also pushed toward Dobropillia and on the Huliaipole direction in Zaporizhzhia Oblast. That day, Russia fired 7,557 kamikaze drones and dropped 235 guided aerial bombs. In one recent week, Russian forces launched nearly 8,000 Molniya and Lancet drones at the front alone.

The day cost Russia another 2,290 troops. Its total since February 2022 now stands at about 1,606,400 killed and wounded, the General Staff’s tally shows.

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Ukraine’s drone commander sees more Russians at the front, not fewer

Robert Brovdi, callsign Madyar, commands Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces. His drone pilots killed or wounded 751 Russian troops on 5 November, a new daily high for the force, he wrote on Telegram. The previous peak, 708, came on 1 November.

Brovdi tied the climbing count to Russia’s manpower. “This points to an unprecedented buildup of enemy manpower at the front,” he wrote, blaming Russia’s poorly hidden mobilization. Of his pilots’ tally, 71% came on the Dobropillia and Huliaipole directions. On the Huliaipole direction, a Russian division praised for taking Mala Tokmachka a year ago is still trying to capture it.

In Moscow, meanwhile, police detained young people in the central Kitay-gorod area on 7 November and handed adults draft notices, Russian Telegram channel Ostorozhno Novosti reported. “They bring in 10 people at a time, hand out draft notices, and take them away,” released detainees told the channel.

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Germany’s defense minister sees no Russian progress on the ground

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius gave a lower estimate than Kyiv’s, but described the same battlefield. “On the ground, the Russian armed forces are making no progress, the losses are enormous, 30,000 to 40,000 soldiers a month,” he told the Berliner Morgenpost, Focus Online reported.

The same interview brought bad news for Ukraine’s air defense. Pistorius ruled out more German Patriot systems for now, saying Berlin would not get replacements for what it gives. Other countries now have to do more, he said.