Russia has registered the deaths of 11,335 foreign nationals in its war against Ukraine, according to confidential records from the country’s statistics agency reviewed by Bloomberg. The dead, recorded between the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022 and late August 2026, came from nearly 100 countries, offering the clearest picture yet of how far Moscow has gone abroad to sustain its war effort.
The figures come from a cache of more than 11 million death certificates obtained by the Belarusian hacking group Cyber Partisans and the Ukrainian operation Silent Crow, who said on 1 November that they had breached the internal systems of Rosstat, Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service, extracting some 23 terabytes of data. Bloomberg identified war-linked deaths through official classification codes or wording in the records referring to military operations, shelling or drones.
The foreign toll sits within a far larger one. Bloomberg previously reported, from the same cache, that the Kremlin has registered about 400,000 war-related deaths in total since February 2022. Foreign deaths have risen roughly in step with the overall toll, climbing more than eightfold from about 630 in 2022 to more than 5,500 in 2025.
The records show Russia drew most heavily on the former Soviet states it regards as its sphere of influence. About 3,700 of the dead were Ukrainian citizens or were born in Ukraine after independence in 1991, most with addresses in occupied areas of eastern and southern Ukraine. Just over 6,000 were born outside Russia but held Russian citizenship when they died, and about 80 per cent of the remainder came from other former Soviet countries. Roughly 340 of the dead were from Africa, mostly from 2025 onwards, with the largest contingents from Egypt, Cameroon, Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana. Recruitment appears to have come in waves: a high concentration of deaths from Nepal in 2023 and 2024, Sri Lanka and China in 2024 and 2025, then Colombia, Kenya and Nigeria from late 2025.
Notably, no North Korean fatalities appear in the dataset as war-related, even though North Korea has deployed thousands of troops to support Russia, suggesting Moscow issued no death certificates for those deaths. Nearly all of the foreign dead — 99 per cent — were men.
These figures must be treated with caution. The data has not been independently verified: Rosstat has acknowledged cyberattacks on its systems between 29 October and 1 November but says it found no evidence its databases were compromised or confidential information leaked, and it did not respond to Bloomberg’s request for comment. Meduza and Mediazona, the independent Russian outlets which also have access to the material, say they are still checking its authenticity and completeness, including whether it was deliberately altered. The dataset almost certainly understates the true toll, because registering a combat death can take months or years, missing people are not included, and the 2026 records are incomplete.
Moscow does not publish figures for foreign recruitment, and the Kremlin has denied using deceptive methods to enlist fighters abroad. Ukraine says Russia had recruited about 46,000 foreign nationals as of October and planned to recruit 18,500 more this year. Several countries, including Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Kenya and Ghana, have raised concerns after their citizens died on the front lines, and Peru’s foreign minister travelled to Moscow last week seeking answers over at least 430 Peruvians recruited into Russian forces, of whom 25 have died and more than 180 are missing.
Sources: Bloomberg (original reporting, 11 November 2026), as reported by Euronews: https://www.europesays.com/russia/88418/ ; Meduza: https://nsaqxpzbzfqqdedt.gjr7l8elrntr.lat/en/news/2026/11/12/at-least-11-000-foreign-born-fighters-have-died-fighting-for-russia-in-ukraine-leaked-government-data-shows-bloomberg-reports
