Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service, or Rosstat, has become the unlikely center of a major information war. Belarusian Cyber Partisans and the Silent Crow collective claim they breached the agency between October 29 and November 1, extracted roughly 23TB of data, and accessed records that could shed new light on Russian losses in Ukraine. Rosstat acknowledges coordinated attacks against its systems but says its databases and legally protected information were not compromised. The alleged Rosstat data theft remains unverified.
The attackers say they reached approximately 25,000 computers spanning Rosstat’s central administration, regional offices, and its Main Interregional Center for Processing and Dissemination of Statistical Information. Their account describes a destructive intrusion affecting domain controllers, databases, virtualization systems, document-management tools, VPN access, employee workstations, and internal statistical platforms. Messages attributed to the groups appeared on Rosstat’s main website and regional portals, while the agency’s public services remained inaccessible during the disruption. Independent coverage says Rosstat characterized the operation as carefully coordinated and involving simultaneous attacks on multiple parts of its infrastructure.
The most consequential claim concerns files marked for official use only that allegedly contain Russian military-loss information. A graphic circulated by the hackers appears to show monthly Russian military deaths ranging from roughly 25,000 to nearly 50,000 over the past two years, with October 2026 approaching the upper end of that range. That chart has not been independently authenticated, and the groups have not publicly released a complete underlying dataset. The figures should therefore be treated as an allegation, not a confirmed casualty count.
Rosstat would be a valuable target precisely because it sits outside Russia’s conventional military apparatus. Its responsibilities include demographic, economic, labor, census, and mortality data, making the agency a potential source for information that security services and defense officials have sought to keep out of public view. Rosstat’s own methodology includes deaths resulting from military operations, but the agency stopped publishing annual cause-of-death statistics in 2024, according to The Insider. Public access to other demographic breakdowns has also narrowed since the full-scale invasion.
The alleged numbers arrive amid a wider dispute over the scale of Russia’s battlefield losses. Ukraine’s General Staff said Russian forces suffered approximately 54,400 personnel casualties in October, a figure that includes killed, wounded, and missing troops rather than deaths alone. The Kyiv Independent noted that the estimate was described as the highest monthly total of the war, but it cannot be independently verified. Other assessments, including statistical modeling cited by The Economist, produce broad ranges for Russian deaths and similarly underline how difficult it is to separate confirmed fatalities from total personnel losses.
For Cyber Partisans and Silent Crow, the operation would be a significant propaganda and intelligence victory even if the casualty material ultimately proves incomplete. The groups have previously claimed responsibility for disruptive attacks involving Russian corporate and transport systems, and both are designated extremist organizations and banned in Russia. Rosstat says security specialists are working with law enforcement to determine how the attackers gained access and whether protected information left the network. Until verifiable files, forensic evidence, or a formal investigation emerge, the central question is not whether the breach disrupted Russia’s statistical machinery—it clearly did—but whether the promised data can substantiate the human cost of the war.
