Bloomberg: More Than 11,000 Foreigners From Hundreds Of Countries Have Died In The Russian Military's War Against Ukraine
- 11.11.2026, 21:06
Moscow lures people into a war “for the Russian world” through deception or money.
Rosstat has recorded the deaths of 11,335 foreigners whom Moscow lured—by force, deception, or money—into the war for the “Russian World.” These are people who were born outside Russia or held foreign citizenship, according to Bloomberg. The data comes from a Rosstat database containing more than 11 million death certificates and related information, such as citizenship, place of birth, and place of death. The data was obtained by the Belarusian group “Cyberpartisans” and the Ukrainian hacker group Silent Crow, who shared the information with the media.
The deaths are directly linked to the war, as the documents cite “special military operation,” “shelling,” “drones,” or use corresponding codes when describing the causes of death. The deaths were recorded between February 24, 2022, and the end of August 2026.
Citizens of the former Soviet republics are being recruited in the greatest numbers for the war against Ukraine: Kazakhstan and the countries of Central Asia lead in the number of fatalities. About 3,700 of the foreign nationals killed were either citizens of Ukraine or were born there after the country gained independence. Judging by their addresses, most of them lived in the occupied regions in the east and south of the country. After the full-scale invasion, Russian authorities often forcibly drove men from the “DPR” and “LPR” to the front lines, rounding them up to be taken to military registration offices.
It was also not uncommon in cities within Russia itself for migrants from Central Asia who had obtained Russian citizenship to be forcibly conscripted into the army. For the purposes of this analysis, individuals born outside Russia but within the territory of the USSR prior to its dissolution were counted as foreigners only if they held citizenship of another country, Bloomberg notes.
The actual casualty figures among foreigners are higher, as the data is incomplete—especially for the current year—and, moreover, months may pass between a soldier’s death on the front lines and the registration of that death. Furthermore, not all bodies are recovered from the battlefield and can be identified; some are listed as missing in action, while others may have died from their wounds after leaving active duty, though this is not indicated on their death certificates.
Also missing from the list are the North Korean soldiers whom Kim Jong-un sent to assist Vladimir Putin. As a BBC investigation based on satellite imagery and official photographs of a memorial subsequently erected in North Korea revealed, approximately 2,300 soldiers died in the Kursk region.
Casualties among foreign nationals rose roughly in tandem with the total number of war dead, increasing more than eightfold since the invasion—from 630 in 2022 to more than 5,500 in 2025.
In total, Russia recruited citizens from nearly 100 countries to fight in its war. Recruitment appears to have taken place in waves and expanded geographically as the need arose to find more cannon fodder due to the rising death toll among Russian troops.
The data indicates high casualties among citizens of Nepal in 2023 and 2024, Sri Lanka and China in 2024 and 2025, and, starting in late 2025, residents of Colombia, Kenya, and Nigeria. Approximately 340 of the dead were from Africa, where Russia actively lures the poor by promising them jobs in supposedly civilian positions with high salaries by their standards. Africans died mainly in 2025–2026; the majority of them were citizens of Egypt, Cameroon, Nigeria, Kenya, and Ghana.
In recent months, the authorities in Kenya and Ghana have demanded that Moscow stop deceivingly luring their citizens into war, while South Africa and Botswana have officially warned their residents not to accept offers from recruiters.
Russian headhunters are having to cast their nets ever wider. Ukraine reported that it had captured its first Indonesian—a 49-year-old man from the island of Java, according to The Guardian. Indonesia has become a new recruitment ground: according to the Ukrainian project “I Want to Live,” 283 Indonesians were enlisted in the Russian army in the first nine months of this year, compared to no more than 10 over the previous three years.