It has long been an open secret that foreign fighters are active in Ukraine, on both sides of the conflict.
Early in the war, which is now approaching the 5-year mark, foreign and Western volunteers and mercenaries poured into Ukraine in support of its armed forces.
But then as the grinding war of attrition went on for years, there began to be more and more ackowledgement that the Kremlin too was relying on foreign units.
This included, by some estimates, at least 10,000 Noth Korean troops assisting Russia's military. There was also a recruitment drive among African nations, which saw impoverished men travel to Russia - hastily sign military contracts - and then quickly find themselves on the front lines in the Donbass region.
Leaked data from Russian state systems reveals that over 11,000 foreign nationals fighting for Russia have been killed in the four-and-a-half years since the Ukraine war started.
This is based on leaked records from the state statistics agency Rosstat, which have been reported on and reviewed by Bloomberg.
The publication cited that the figures come from between Feb. 24, 2022, and late August 2026.
The majority of these deaths were people hailing from Central Asia, having come from other former Soviet states.
North Korea too has lately acknowledged its lost hundreds of its own, after Pyongyang aggreed to a joint mission with its defense ally Moscow.
Examining the data, the Amsterdam-based Moscow Times draws some of the following conclusions:
- Of the 11,335 foreign fatalities, just over 6,000 of those killed were born outside Russia but had obtained Russian citizenship prior to their deaths. Moscow offers fast-track naturalization in exchange for military service.
- Around 3,700 of the dead were Ukrainian citizens or were born in post-Soviet Ukraine, with most of them living in Russian-occupied eastern and southern Ukraine.
- Around 80% of the remaining fatalities came from other former Soviet states, particularly in Central Asia.
- Outside those countries, Rosstat data offers a glimpse into Russia’s recruitment efforts in developing nations over the years. Nepal accounted for a high concentration of deaths between 2023 and 2024, Sri Lanka and China in 2024-25 and then Colombia, Kenya and Nigeria from late 2025.
The same alleged leak info, which reportedly obtained by the Belarusian opposition-linked hacker group Cyber Partisans and the Ukrainian hacking collective Silent Crow, points to an incredibly grim and high figure of more than 400,000 Russians killed fighting in Ukraine since 2022.
The Guardian writes, "According to the data, 412,576 death certificates explicitly linked the fatalities to the war, either through official cause-of-death codes or written references to combat and military operations."