Leaked Russian Records Show 11,335 Foreign Deaths in Ukraine War

The figures sit inside a cache of more than 11 million death certificates obtained by the Belarusian group Cyber Partisans and the Ukrainian hacker operation Silent Crow, then shared with Bloomberg.

The 11,335 people were either born outside Russia or held foreign citizenship. Their deaths, recorded from Feb. 24, 2022, to late August 2026, were linked to the war through coding or wording such as “military operation,” “shelling” or “drones.”

Bloomberg had previously reported that the Kremlin has registered about 400,000 war-related deaths since the full-scale invasion, a tally that includes this foreign-linked total. Rosstat did not reply to a request for comment.

Who the Records Count

The records reviewed by Bloomberg suggest the Russian military drew most heavily on former Soviet states. About 3,700 of the dead were Ukrainian citizens or were born in Ukraine after 1991. Among records that included an address, most lived in occupied areas of eastern and southern Ukraine.

Just over 6,000 people in the foreign-linked tally held Russian citizenship when they died. About 80% of the remaining dead were from other former Soviet countries.

Recruitment Waves Abroad

Bloomberg reported a high concentration of deaths from Nepal in 2023 and 2024, from Sri Lanka and China in 2024 and 2025, and from Colombia, Kenya and Nigeria from late 2025. Roughly 340 of the dead came from Africa, mostly from 2025 onward, led by Egypt, Cameroon, Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana.

Cameroon earlier confirmed 16 of its nationals had been killed while serving as military contractors for Russia. African governments have also accused Russia of luring recruits with false job offers, a charge the Kremlin has denied after Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Kenya and Ghana raised concerns.

Dmytro Usov, who coordinates Ukraine’s treatment of prisoners of war, said Russia had recruited about 46,000 foreign nationals as of October and that Ukraine had captured combatants from 59 countries. A separate estimate by Ukraine’s spy chief put the total at around 28,000.

Gaps in the Count

No North Korean fatalities appear in the dataset as war-related, even though Pyongyang has deployed thousands of troops to help Russia. Bloomberg said Russia may not have issued death certificates for troops who served in foreign units.

The hacked data was incomplete, especially for 2026, because combat deaths can take months or years to register. Missing personnel, unidentified bodies and later deaths from injuries mean the set almost certainly understates the number of foreign fighters killed, Bloomberg said.

An earlier analysis of the same leak put overall war-linked deaths recorded by Rosstat in the hundreds of thousands. Silent Crow and Cyber Partisans said on Nov. 1 that they had extracted about 23 terabytes of data from Rosstat. The agency later said it had detected cyberattacks but found no evidence that its databases had been compromised.