Rosstat data shows 11,335 foreigners killed fighting for Russia in Ukraine

What the data shows

Bloomberg reports that Rosstat, Russia's federal statistics agency, holds records of 11,335 foreigners killed in the war against Ukraine. The people counted were born outside Russia or held foreign citizenship, and they came from nearly 100 countries. The deaths fall between 24 February 2022, when the full-scale invasion began, and the end of August 2026. A death was linked to the war when the record used terms such as 'special military operation', shelling or drones, or carried a special code. The figures are incomplete because registration of deaths has lagged behind.

How the records were obtained

The material came from a database of more than 11 million death records that also contains citizenship, place of birth and circumstances of death. The Belarusian opposition group Cyber Partisans and the Ukrainian hacker group Silent Crow obtained access and passed the documents to Bloomberg and several other newsrooms. Russia has long denied recruiting foreign citizens and has refused to publish figures on the subject. Ukrainian officials have offered their own recruitment estimates, set out below.

Where the dead came from

About 80% of the foreign dead were nationals of former Soviet republics. Kazakh and Uzbek nationals are the most represented after Ukrainians, and Kazakhstan and other Central Asian states stand out in the data. Around 3,700 people were Ukrainian citizens or were born in Ukraine after independence, and most of them lived in territories of eastern and southern Ukraine now under Russian occupation. DW reports that Russian security forces often forcibly sent local men from the self-proclaimed 'DNR' and 'LNR' into the army after mass detentions. Migrants from Central Asia who had received Russian passports were also conscripted, some of them in Russian cities. Between 10 and 49 Brazilians are recorded, while a map published by Bloomberg indicates between 50 and 99 people from Poland, according to TVP Info. Observador reads the same infographic as showing between one and nine Portuguese.

Recruitment waves and gaps

TVP Info reports that deaths of foreigners rose more than eightfold, from about 630 in 2022 to over 5,500 in 2025. According to the documents, Russia recruited foreigners in waves, with unusually high numbers of deaths among Nepalis in 2023 and 2024, among people from Sri Lanka and China in 2024 and 2025, and among people from Colombia, Kenya and Nigeria from late 2025. Around 340 deaths of Africans were recorded, mainly among people from Egypt, Cameroon, Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana.

The data contains no deaths of North Korean soldiers, although at least 2,000 of them died at the front, according to the reporting. Bloomberg suggests Russia did not issue death certificates for them, possibly because they served in separate foreign units rather than joining Russian forces as individuals. The real toll is therefore likely higher than the registry shows.

Recruitment estimates and reactions

According to Dmytro Usov, secretary of Ukraine's Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, Moscow had recruited about 46,000 foreigners by October this year. The head of Ukraine's intelligence service puts the figure at about 28,000. Bloomberg reports that Ukraine has taken soldiers from 59 countries prisoner. Officials from Kazakhstan, Kenya, Ghana and Peru have raised the question of foreign recruitment with their own governments' attention to it.