VLADIMIR Putin’s staggering war death toll has been exposed in a massive data hack revealing more than 450,000 Russians have been killed in Ukraine.
Hackers breached Moscow’s statistics agency and seized secret death records in a blow to the Kremlin’s efforts to conceal its battlefield losses.
The bombshell leak comes as Russian troops continue to die in huge numbers, with more than 200,000 deaths projected for this year alone.
Cyber groups Silent Crow and Belarusian Cyber Partisans hacked Rosstat, stealing records from its internal database covering February 2022 to August this year.
The stolen files contained information from death certificates, exposing the potentially catastrophic human cost of Putin’s invasion.
Pro-Ukrainian hacking group Silent Crow published the data, estimating that 450,100 Russians had been killed in the conflict.
But Belarusian Cyber Partisans, which opposes dictator , put the toll at 393,881 using a narrower method that specifically identified military operations as the cause of death.
Both groups are banned by Russia as “extremist organisations”.
Rosstat admitted its systems had been targeted between October 29 and November 1 but insisted no information had been leaked or databases compromised.
The explosive figures have not been independently identified, but broadly match the that 500,000 Russian troops had been killed.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Rich Knighton, head of the UK Armed Forces, warned that Russia’s total casualties, including wounded troops, were believed to have reached a staggering 1.5 million since February 2022.
And the bloodshed shows little sign of slowing, with hackers projecting more than 200,000 Russian deaths across 2026 if the current deadly trend continues.
Janis Kluge, head of the Russia and Eurasia division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told The Moscow Times: “This is the most significant leak of data when it comes to Russian casualties.”
He added: “I think it’s established as a fact that the war has never been more deadly than it is right now.”
The Kremlin has kept its true death toll under wraps for years, last officially disclosing Russian military losses in September 2022.
Now, more than four years into Putin’s bloody invasion, both sides are struggling to replenish their battered forces.
Russia is reportedly signing up between 1,000 and 1,200 new recruits every day in a desperate bid to keep its war machine running.
Putin has also hauled in North Korean troops to feed his meatgrinder battlefield – with the tyrant nation sending in more than 10,000 soldiers.
But Ukrainian intelligence estimates Moscow is losing more than 1,400 troops daily on the front line.
The war-stricken nation is bracing for a harsh as Russia ramps up its attacks – battering Ukraine with showers of and missiles.
On Saturday Putin’s forces in Kyiv in the tyrant’s latest evil night of on war-ravaged Ukraine.
A 14-year-old girl was among at least nine injured as a wave of hypersonic and ballistic rockets rained down on the capital.
Just days earlier the tyrant bombed a school which had turned into a humanitarian centre in one of the worst horrors of the war.
A staggering including two rescue workers and four officers.
Bodies pulled from the wreckage have been so badly wounded that they are yet to be identified, according to officials.
