Leaked Rosstat records reviewed by Bloomberg list 11,335 foreign-linked war deaths on Russia’s side

Documented: On 11 November 2026, Bloomberg reported that it had reviewed a cache of more than 11 million Russian death certificates, obtained by the Belarusian group Cyber Partisans and the Ukrainian group Silent Crow and shared with Bloomberg and a small set of other outlets. Within that cache, journalists counted 11,335 people born outside Russia or holding foreign citizenship whose deaths, recorded between 24 February 2022 and late August 2026, were explicitly tied to the war through cause-of-death codes or wording such as “military operation,” “shelling,” or “drones.” The dead were linked to nearly 100 countries. The Moscow Times, Meduza, and other outlets subsequently reported the same Bloomberg analysis.

Documented breakdown from that review: just over 6,000 of the 11,335 were born outside Russia but held Russian citizenship at death, consistent with Moscow’s documented practice of fast-track naturalization in exchange for military service. About 3,700 were Ukrainian citizens or were born in Ukraine after 1991; addresses in the records place most of them in Russian-occupied eastern and southern Ukraine. Of the remainder, about 80 percent were born in other former Soviet states, especially Central Asia. Foreign war-linked deaths in the file rose from about 630 in 2022 to more than 5,500 in 2025. Nearly 99 percent were men; of 159 women, 154 were recorded as residents of occupied Ukrainian areas. The same review found no North Korean war deaths in the certificates, which reporters treated as a gap rather than evidence that none occurred.

Documented pattern, not a complete census: the geography of recorded deaths shifted over time—concentrations from Nepal in 2023–24, Sri Lanka and China in 2024–25, then Colombia, Kenya, and Nigeria from late 2025. Journalists noted that registration delays, missing personnel, unidentified bodies, incomplete 2026 entries, and fighters who never entered Russian enlistment records mean the file almost certainly undercounts. Rosstat acknowledged targeted cyberattacks between 29 October and 1 November 2026 and said it found no evidence that databases were compromised or confidential data leaked. It did not answer Bloomberg’s request for comment. The hackers’ claim to have extracted roughly 23 terabytes remains their claim; independent outlets have reported the certificates they were given, not a public forensic confirmation of the intrusion.

The same leak, analyzed separately, is the basis for a much larger Russian death figure. Documented in Bloomberg’s earlier review of the certificates: nearly 392,700 records between February 2022 and late August 2026 explicitly link the death to the war, which Bloomberg summarized as about 400,000. Claimed by the hacker groups, using different inclusion rules: Cyber Partisans put a minimum at 393,881; Silent Crow’s broader count, which adds some non-combat military deaths and other categories, reaches as high as about 450,100. Those totals are not a confirmed battlefield census. They are counts of registered certificates under stated methods, and they can include civilians killed in fighting as well as combatants. Moscow has not published an official loss figure since September 2022.

What the records do not show: they are not a count of foreign fighters killed on both sides, and they do not by themselves establish how people were recruited—contract, coercion, deception, or occupation-area conscription. Ukraine’s figure of nearly 46,000 foreigners in Russia’s forces is a Ukrainian military claim reported alongside the leak, not a finding of the Rosstat file. North Korean troop deployments, separately acknowledged by Pyongyang as having produced its own dead, do not appear in this particular certificate set.

Speculation to keep separate from the documents: that foreign recruits are uniquely “disposable,” or that the leak settles the political argument over how the war is narrated. What the certificates do establish, if the shared data hold up under further verification, is a paper trail inside Russia’s own statistics system of foreign-born and foreign-citizen deaths coded to the war, a heavy share of them from former Soviet states and occupied Ukraine, and a rising annual toll as recruitment geography widened beyond the post-Soviet space.