Coffin Money: Russia Put a Price on Its War Dead. Now It Is Marking It Down

1. A register that was never meant to be read

Every count of Russia's war dead so far has been built from the outside: names gathered from obituaries and graves, inheritance files, intelligence estimates. The Rosstat files, if they are genuine, come from the inside. They are said to be the civil registry's own lines of data, one for each death certificate, each with a medical code for the cause of death. That is exactly the information the Russian state has stopped sharing. In 2025 Rosstat began withholding even its basic mortality figures. The defence ministry's last official toll was 5,937 dead, given by Sergei Shoigu in September 2022. When CSIS published its estimate in January, Dmitry Peskov said that only the defence ministry could release such figures.

The intrusion became public overnight on 31 October, when the logos of the Belarusian Cyber Partisans and Silent Crow appeared on Rosstat's federal and regional websites with a message in Belarusian: no one will escape responsibility. Russia's Supreme Court had declared both groups "extremist" in July, according to The Insider. They claim about six months of access, some 23 terabytes taken from about 25,000 computers, and part of the agency's systems destroyed. Rosstat confirmed "targeted destructive cyberattacks" from 29 October to 1 November but said no database or protected information had leaked. Its website was still down days later, and the agency extended the deadline for companies' statistical reports to 13 November.

The groups have released their material in stages. By 4 November they had published eight internal files, The Insider reported, among them a letter telling staff to keep the four occupied Ukrainian regions out of national statistics and a table of registered deaths in Krasnoyarsk Krai. On 7 November came the analysis that matters here: a tabulation of what they say is Rosstat's "Demography" system, every death certificate registered from February 2022 to late August 2026, without names. Meduza and Mediazona, whose own estimates are the reference in this field, say they have access to the data and are checking it for completeness and deliberate falsification. By the evening of 9 November, Le Détroit had found no published verdict from them and no Kremlin comment on the leak.

So every figure from the leak below is the hackers' calculation, tested against what is already known. The test matters because of what the register would be if it holds. A list of the dead kept by the state that pays for them is half of a ledger. The other half, the payments, is what this piece is about.

The evidence board: what the hackers chose to show

Material published by the two groups on 1 November and after; none of it authenticated by Le Détroit

Inside the network, as claimed. Said to show Rosstat's internal directory. Cropped by Le Détroit: lower rows list computers named after employees.

The announcement, 1 November. Public post, French interface; second thumbnail blurred by Le Détroit.

Letter A. Donetskstat, 3 June 2025. Names blurred.

Letter B. Rosstat to the agriculture ministry. Names blurred.

What the board proves, and what it does notA: a Rosstat expert estimate puts occupied Donetsk at 2,892.9 thousand people, "not official statistical information". B: food-balance data, barred from "the media" (both translated by Le Détroit). The screenshots illustrate access; the letters show the paperwork the groups say they took. None of it says anything about the death records, which the groups have described but not released. Personal names, phone numbers and e-signature certificate details blurred by Le Détroit.

2. Two counts and a curve that bends upward

The two groups did not agree on a total, and their disagreement is the best guide to the data (Figure 1). The Cyber Partisans counted only records whose cause is war: the medical code Y36, "operations of war", its late-effects code Y89.1, or a written cause naming combat. That gives 393,881 deaths to 27 August. Silent Crow added non-combat deaths of servicemen, records marked "terrorist act", people registered in Russia who died in occupied areas or in Ukraine with no cause given, and an estimate for front-line records with no cause at all. That gives a range of 444,716 to 450,100, the number that travelled.

Neither is a clean count of soldiers. Y36 is a medical code, not a military one, and covers civilians killed by shelling, as the hackers acknowledge; 99.4% of the people counted are men, most aged 30 to 49. Nor is the count complete. A missing soldier enters the register only when a court declares him dead, and foreign fighters mostly die outside Russian registries. Le Détroit therefore treats 393,881 as the core and 450,100 as an upper bound for the register as it stood in August.

The yearly series shows a war that has become deadlier, not steadier (Figure 2). Deaths in the register rose from 18,877 in 2022 to 42,365 in 2023, 109,683 in 2024 and 182,264 in 2025: about 499 a day, more than in the three previous years combined. The "100,000 a year" in circulation is an average that hides this acceleration. The register also runs late by design. By the hackers' estimate only 26% of deaths reach the database within a month and 69% within six, which is why 2026 shows just 39,296. Correcting for the lag, they put the dead at about 504,280 on 28 August, and project 562,979 to 596,888 by the end of the year. Those are their models, not records.

The strongest argument for the data comes from elsewhere. In May, Meduza and Mediazona estimated 352,000 deaths to the end of 2025 from excess inheritance cases. The register's records for 2022 to 2025 sum to 353,189, a gap of 0.3%. That does not prove authenticity, since the May estimate was public, but the profile matches too: Meduza put 2022 at 19,000 to 20,000 deaths; the register shows 18,877. Mediazona and BBC Russian have named 285,881 dead, about 73% of the core count. Western estimates bracket the leak, from 275,000 to 325,000 battlefield deaths to the end of 2025 by CSIS to "more than half a million" by Britain's defence chief in September. Ukraine's General Staff figure of about 1.6 million is not comparable, because it includes the wounded.

Two comparisons give the scale. The Soviet Union officially lost 15,051 people in nine years in Afghanistan; the register counts about 30 times that in half the time. And 450,100 is 0.66% of all Russian men, by Le Détroit's calculation, a share that falls almost entirely on men of working age.

3. The geography of the dead

The war is fought, disproportionately, by the regions that earn least. The leak gives a first, rough picture of this. By home address, 21.7% of the dead were from the Volga federal district, 16.9% from the Central district and 26.7% from Siberia and the Far East, bne IntelliNews reported from the hackers' analysis. Against the 2021 census, Siberia and the Far East, home to 16.8% of the population, supply 1.6 times their population share of the dead; the Central district, which includes Moscow and holds 27.4% of Russians, only 0.6 times its share (Figure 3). The other four districts were not split in what was published.

The named-dead lists, which are older and built differently, sharpen the picture to the level of the region. By BBC Russian's count in May 2025, Tuva had lost 120 men per 10,000, Buryatia 91 and the Altai Republic 89. Moscow had lost 3. A man from Tuva was 40 times as likely as a Muscovite to appear on the list. Mediazona's own map, published in February, puts Tuva at 476 confirmed dead per 100,000 residents, Buryatia at 400 and Zabaykalsky Krai at 362. Even within one district the spread is wide: Idel.Realii, a Radio Liberty project, counted 47 dead per 10,000 men in Perm Krai and 46 in Bashkortostan in June 2025, with Kirov region ranked higher still, against 18 in Penza and 17 in Mordovia. In raw numbers the big Volga republics lead: by 6 November Mediazona and BBC had named 11,990 dead from Bashkortostan and 10,187 from Tatarstan.

The pattern holds below the regional level. Mediazona found that 68% of the named dead came from towns and cities, against 75% of the population, and that cities of over 100,000 people, home to more than half of Russians, account for only a third of the dead. What sends men differs by place. In Tuva, prisoners made up 23% of the dead; in the Altai Republic, 47% were volunteers who signed contracts, almost twice the national share, according to the BBC. A third method points the same way: working from regional budgets, the German economist Janis Kluge estimated in October 2025 that death payments implied tolls of 0.16% of the population in Bashkortostan and 0.04% in the Moscow region.

The two datasets cannot be merged. The leak counts death records by registered address; the lists count people identified from open sources, and undercount the countryside. A full regional table from either was not available to us. But three methods, from three directions, describe the same map: the periphery dies and the capitals pay taxes.

4. The price list

Behind each line of the register sits what Russians call "grobovye", coffin money. The economist Vladislav Inozemtsev gave the system a name, "deathonomics", and a definition that is hard to improve on.

The price list is public, law by law (Figure 4). The family of a serviceman killed in 2026 is due three federal sums: 5 million rubles under Decree No. 98 of March 2022, unchanged since; a one-off benefit of 5.52 million under law 306-FZ; and an insurance sum of 3.68 million under law 52-FZ, both indexed each year. Together that is 14.2 million rubles, about $173,000 or €154,000 at the Bank of Russia's rates. Most regions add 1 million and Moscow 3 million. Then come a monthly compensation of 25,783 rubles shared by the family and a survivor pension from 18,848 rubles per non-working relative. A wound brings 3 million rubles from the federal budget.

Money on this scale reorganises families. The payments are split among eligible relatives, so a wife, parents and children can find themselves on opposite sides of the same death. In June, Yaroslav Nilov, who chairs the Duma's labour and veterans committee, was asked about "black widows": women who register a marriage with a soldier shortly before he deploys and then claim the payments. He said such cases should go to the courts and that earlier bills on the subject had failed, the regional agency EAN reported. The same report said police and the FSB in Sverdlovsk Region had detained a group suspected of stealing payments from men who had just signed contracts. The state built a price list; a market grew around it.

5. Worth more dead than alive

In poor regions the coffin outbids the career. Inozemtsev's estimate is that a recruit from an average region who fights for a year and is killed earns his family what he "could not have earned over fifteen or twenty years", and in some cases about twenty-five. Le Détroit ran the arithmetic with Rosstat's regional wage data for August 2026, as compiled by T-Zh (Figure 5).

The average accrued wage in Tuva was 74,624 rubles a month, or about 895,000 a year. The 15.2 million rubles due on a death with a 1 million regional payment equal 17.0 years of that wage. In Buryatia, at 82,032 rubles a month, the figure is 15.4 years; at the Russian average of 103,014 rubles, 12.3 years. In Moscow, where wages are 2.4 times Tuva's, the death is worth 8.1 years even with the capital's 3 million regional payment. Add one year of front-line pay and sign-up bonuses, about 19.6 million rubles in all on our conservative case, and the Tuvan figure becomes 21.9 years: most of the remaining working life of a man of 35.

The model flatters the civilian side. An average wage is pulled up by the best-paid jobs, and many men in poor regions have no formal job at all; a median would be lower, and so would the years. It also ignores the war's own effect on wages: Tuva's average rose 20.6% in the year to August 2026, about twice the national pace, the same T-Zh data show. But the direction is not in doubt. For a man of 35 in Kyzyl or Ulan-Ude, the state's offer is most of a working life's earnings, paid within a year, on one condition.

That is the logic the writer Ksenia Buksha described in Novaya Gazeta Europe in 2024: debts, harsh drug sentences and dead ends make a contract look like an exit, and the death payment makes dying look, on paper, like a rational sacrifice for a family. Le Détroit does not claim that men sign up to die. The point is narrower and harder: the state has set a price at which a death is worth more to a poor family than the man's working life, and it has set that price deliberately.

6. Paying the living to die

The price of a living recruit has risen far faster than the price of a dead one. At the end of 2023 the average regional sign-up bonus was 168,000 rubles; a year later it was 897,000, 5.3 times as much, according to iStories, which tracks all 85 regions. At the end of July 2024 Vladimir Putin doubled the federal bonus from 195,000 to 400,000 rubles. By 2025 sign-up bonuses ran at 2 million to 3.5 million, Inozemtsev writes; in the months to March 2026 sixteen regions raised theirs again, and Khanty-Mansi set a record at 4.1 million. Pay followed: from a base salary of 35,000 to 45,000 rubles a month early in the war to 200,000 to 215,000 at the front in 2025 (Figure 6).

The dead have not kept up. Federal death payments came to about 13.2 million rubles in 2024, by Verstka's tally of the official sums; at 2026 rates they are 14.2 million, a rise of about 8% that comes entirely from indexation. In a single year, from the end of 2023 to the end of 2024, the average regional sign-up bonus more than quintupled. One man who signs, serves a year and dies now costs the state 19.6 million to 23.3 million rubles on our estimates, and more of that than ever is paid while he is alive.

The totals have followed the prices. Re:Russia, an analysis platform run by exiled Russian academics, estimated that federal and regional budgets spent about 2 trillion rubles on manpower in the first half of 2025: about 400 billion on bonuses, about 860 billion on pay and 750 billion to 765 billion on payments to the families of the dead and to the wounded. In October it put the pace at more than 3 trillion in six months, about 6 trillion rubles a year. In February it estimated that recruiting for a new offensive in Donbas could cost up to 5.1 trillion, 38% of it compensation for the killed. Inozemtsev sees the machine stalling: the pool of volunteers is drying up, he argues, even as bonuses climb. Novaya Gazeta Europe calculated in March that a contract soldier now receives nine times the state support given to a large family.

7. Where the money lands, and where it gets lost

The money is real, and it shows where the dead come from. Laura Solanko, an economist at the Bank of Finland's BOFIT institute, found that bank deposits in several of Russia's poorest regions began to diverge from the national average in mid-2022, without any industrial boom to explain it. Deposits nationwide grew about 18% in 2023, Meduza reported from her data; in Tuva they grew by roughly half, 45% on Meduza's measure and 57.6% on the one reported by Radio Liberty's Siberian service, and in Buryatia by 33% on the latter measure. Inozemtsev calls it the redistribution of "considerable resources to depressed regions and low-income social groups". The labour market felt it too: with men at the front and military orders boosting hiring, unemployment hit a record low of 2.1% in August 2025.

That boom is fading. Unemployment was 2.2% in August 2026, but there were 8.5 CVs for every vacancy on the hh.ru job site in September, against 6.4 a year earlier, The Insider reported. And the money does not reach every family that is owed it. A death certificate is the key to every payment on the receipt, and a missing man has none. Court filings to declare people dead or missing averaged about 8,100 a year from 2020 to 2023; they reached 22,900 in 2024 and 79,800 in 2025, by Meduza and Mediazona's count (Figure 9). Their estimate of 352,000 deaths includes about 90,000 men declared dead or missing by courts, or registered months late. A soldier listed as absent without leave loses his pay and his family cannot claim, Radio Liberty reported in September. "I Want to Live", a Ukrainian government project, claims more than 178,000 Russian servicemen are missing.

The wounded are a second, larger and quieter bill. The number of Russian men aged 31 to 59 registered with a disability jumped from 1.67 million in 2022 to 2.17 million in 2023, Verstka found in social fund data; demographers it consulted linked the rise to the war. Each wound brings a federal payment of 3 million rubles. In March, Irkutsk's regional assembly backed in first reading a plan to cut its own injury payments from 300,000 to 600,000 rubles down to 60,000 to 120,000, and to halve its death payment, citing the budget.

8. The rationing

When the money runs short, the dead are the first line of savings. At least 12 regions have cut, postponed or scrapped their death payment in 2026, The Moscow Times and Kyiv Post reported on 5 November (Figure 7). Samara abolished its payment in October. Smolensk cut it from 1 million rubles to 700,000. Stavropol told families that claims filed in November and December would be paid in 2027, instead of within five working days. Belgorod, a border region, cut its payment from 3 million to 1 million. Saratov cut its payment tenfold, from 1 million to 100,000 rubles for the whole family, from 1 November. Kemerovo, Kirov, Omsk, Orenburg, Ulyanovsk, Bashkortostan and Khakassia cut, postponed or scrapped payments earlier in the year.

The same documents keep paying the living. Saratov's resolution, Novaya Gazeta reported, also offers 450,000 rubles to each convict who signs a contract, and the region has paid recruiters 300,000 rubles for each volunteer they bring in, a bounty due to be halved from 1 November. Stavropol, which has now postponed its death payments, had ordered its sign-up bonus raised from 2.4 million to 3.5 million rubles in April, according to Radio Liberty. In Tula, the regional government moved more than 54 million rubles from support for orphans, foster families and low-income households to one-off payments to servicemen, National Guard officers and their families in September.

The reason is arithmetic. The number of regions running a budget deficit rose from 6 in 2022 to 56 in the first quarter of 2026, occupied Ukrainian regions included, according to an Accounts Chamber report cited by Vedomosti. Their combined deficit hit a record 1.5 trillion rubles in 2025, and the finance ministry expects 1.9 trillion in 2026, while federal transfers stay almost flat. Regions spent 813.4 billion rubles on war-related items in 2024, 3.6 times as much as in 2021, by Novaya Gazeta Europe's count. A bonus brings a man to the front. A death payment brings nothing back. When governors must choose, the arithmetic of recruitment favours the living.

9. The bill nobody publishes

Russia does not disclose what it pays for its dead, so Le Détroit did the arithmetic (Figure 8). Multiplying each count by the 2026 federal payments gives 4.06 trillion rubles for the named dead alone. The core leak count with a 1 million regional payment gives 6.0 trillion; the broad count with 3 million, 7.7 trillion. In dollars, $49bn to $94bn. The deaths recorded for 2025 alone represent 2.8 to 3.1 trillion rubles, a fifth to a quarter of this year's defence budget. If the hackers' year-end projection proves right, the entitlement would reach 8.6 to 10.3 trillion.

That is what is due, not what is paid, and the gap between the two may be the most telling number in this story. Re:Russia's estimate of what budgets actually paid to the families of the dead and to the wounded in the first half of 2025, 750 billion to 765 billion rubles, works out at about 1.5 trillion a year. Payments lag deaths, so the fair comparison is with the deaths of the year to mid-2025: about 146,000 if they were spread evenly within each year, whose entitlement at a 1 million regional rate comes to about 2.2 trillion rubles for the dead alone. Even with generous allowances for rates, lags and method, the paid figure looks well short of the due one. The data cannot say whether the difference is deaths paid late, paid at lower regional rates, not paid because no certificate exists, or simply a gap between two estimates. Each explanation is a form of the same thing: the effective price of a death is lower than the legal one.

The federal budget can still carry the bill; the question is what it squeezes. The 2026 budget law put 12.93 trillion rubles into national defence, 29% of spending, and 3.91 trillion into security. Spending is now expected at about 48.5 trillion and the deficit at 3.2% of GDP, double the plan. The 2027 draft lifts defence to 17.1 trillion, 27% more than pencilled in a year ago, while social policy is set 1.2 trillion below the earlier plan, T-Zh calculated. The liquid part of the National Welfare Fund was 3.80 trillion rubles on 1 October, less than even our lowest bill. Our figures err both ways: earlier deaths were paid at lower indexed rates and the war code includes civilians, but pensions, wounds, foreign fighters and the missing are left out.

10. Le Détroit's reading

If the records hold up, the leak settles less than it seems and changes more than it says. It settles an order of magnitude that independent researchers had already reached: roughly 350,000 dead by the end of 2025, perhaps half a million by now. What it changes is the source. A statistics agency has been breached, and the count that came out of it is of the same order as the outside estimates the Kremlin dismisses as untrustworthy. A death toll taken from the state's own registry is a ledger, and a ledger has two sides.

Our reading is that deathonomics was built as a pricing system: a way to buy men without a second mobilisation, by paying the poor periphery more for a death than it could earn in a life. It worked, and the map of the dead is its receipt. What the 2026 data show is that the system is now being rationed at the edges. Regions cut payments to the dead while raising bonuses for the living, because the dead do not re-enlist. The federal sums are indexed, but slowly, while sign-up prices multiply. And between the law and the family stand courts, missing-person rulings, absent-without-leave designations and payment delays, each of which lowers the effective price of a death without any law being changed. Moscow has not touched the federal sums. It is haggling over the rest, one region, one court case and one postponement at a time.

That matters beyond the budget. A war that costs 15.2 million to 17.2 million rubles per death, at 500 deaths a day, adds 2.8 trillion to 3.1 trillion rubles a year to what Russia owes its own families. The economist Janis Kluge, quoted by The Moscow Times, judged that the economic effect of such losses may be small and that their main significance is political. We agree, with one addition: the political contract that made this war tolerable in Tuva and Buryatia was a financial one. A state that starts to haggle over coffins is renegotiating that contract with the people who have paid the most for it.