Pro-Ukraine hackers release files stolen from Russia’s Rosstat, revealing hidden wage debt and mortality in occupied Ukrainian territories

Hackers from Belarus and Russia have published a trove of internal documents from Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service, Rosstat. The files reveal staggering financial and demographic data from Russia's occupied Ukrainian territories. One document shows that as of May 1, 2023, unpaid wage arrears in the Donetsk People's Republic reached 3.13 billion rubles, more than double the 1.48 billion rubles owed in January.

Nearly 94% of this debt was held by organizations struggling to pay workers. Additionally, Rosstat instructed officials to exclude data from the occupied regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson from national statistics, restricting the information to official use only. The hackers also obtained industrial production data for 2025 and shipment volumes for Russian exports in October 2025.

Furthermore, they released death records from Krasnoyarsk Krai in June 2023 and population estimates for the Russian-occupied parts of Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk regions. A document shows that the regional statistics agency in Donetsk continued to provide nonpublic data to local authorities for official use. The hackers gained access to around 25,000 computers in Rosstat's internal network, downloading several terabytes of documents.

They claim to have obtained a database of deaths registered among Russian citizens since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The released files represent just a fraction of the material the hackers say they acquired.