Russia recorded over 11,000 war-related deaths of foreign-born people and foreign nationals, Bloomberg reports
Russian authorities recorded 11,335 war-related deaths involving people born outside Russia or holding foreign citizenship between February 2022 and late August 2026, according to confidential government records obtained by hackers and reviewed by Bloomberg.
The deceased were linked to nearly 100 countries, offering a rare glimpse into the international dimension of Russia's war against Ukraine and its recruitment of foreign nationals.
The findings come from a database containing more than 11 million death certificates held by Russia's federal statistics agency, Rosstat. The records were obtained by Belarusian opposition-linked hackers Cyber Partisans and Ukrainian hacking group Silent Crow.
The database includes information about individuals' citizenship, place of birth and location of death. Bloomberg identified war-related fatalities using official codes and references to terms including “military operation,” “shelling” and “drones.”
The 11,335 deaths form part of approximately 400,000 war-related fatalities recorded in the Russian database, according to an earlier Bloomberg investigation.
Most foreign-born dead came from former Soviet republics
The records show that Russia drew heavily on people with ties to former Soviet states.
Around 3,700 of those counted were Ukrainian citizens or people born in Ukraine after independence in 1991. Most of those whose addresses were available lived in Russian-occupied areas of eastern and southern Ukraine.
Approximately 80% of the remaining deaths involved people from other former Soviet republics.
More than 6,000 people in the overall foreign-born category held Russian citizenship at the time of their deaths, underscoring that the figures do not represent exclusively foreign nationals recruited into Russia's military.
Bloomberg also noted that some individuals born abroad may have been Russian citizens from birth, including children of Soviet military families stationed overseas.
Recruitment shifted from Asia toward Africa and Latin America
The records suggest that Russia's recruitment of foreign nationals evolved over the course of the war.
Deaths involving people from Nepal were particularly concentrated in 2023 and 2024, followed by Sri Lanka and China in 2024 and 2025. From late 2025, fatalities increasingly involved people from Colombia, Kenya and Nigeria.
Around 340 of those recorded dead came from African countries, with most of those deaths occurring from 2025 onward. The largest groups originated from Egypt, Cameroon, Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana.
The number of recorded war-related deaths involving foreign-born people and foreign nationals rose from approximately 630 in 2022 to more than 5,500 in 2025.
According to Ukrainian officials cited by Bloomberg, Russia had recruited approximately 46,000 foreign nationals by October 2026, although another Ukrainian intelligence estimate put the figure closer to 28,000.
North Korean deaths missing from the records
Despite North Korea sending thousands of troops to support Russia, the database contains no war-related death certificates for North Korean nationals.
Bloomberg suggested that Russia may not have issued such certificates for members of foreign military units.
The absence highlights significant limitations in the data, which may also exclude missing personnel, unidentified bodies and deaths registered months or years after they occurred.
Rosstat did not respond to Bloomberg's request for comment on the findings.
The Russian statistics agency previously acknowledged cyberattacks on its systems between October 29 and November 1 but denied finding evidence that confidential data had been compromised or leaked.
The hackers, however, claimed to have extracted approximately 23 terabytes of information from Rosstat's infrastructure.
The findings suggest that the actual number of foreign nationals and foreign-born people killed in Russia's war may be substantially higher than the figures recorded in the leaked database.