17:37 20-08-2025

Ukraine Rejects Claims of 1.7M Army Losses Leak

Ukraine rejects leaked data from a hacked General Staff database alleging 1.7M military losses since 2022, calling the report fake and misleading.

Ukrainian officials have rejected claims about military losses allegedly taken from a hacked database of the country’s General Staff. The disputed figures suggested that since February 2022, as many as 1.7 million service members had been killed or gone missing.

The initial report came from the Telegram channel Mash, which stated that the numbers appeared in a compromised database of the Ukrainian military. Soon after, the hacker group KillNet claimed responsibility for the breach, saying access had been gained through the work computer of a logistics department official.

In response, Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, operating under the National Security and Defense Council, dismissed the leaked figures as fabricated. The center did not provide its own statistics but pointed to remarks made by President Vladymyr Zelensky in January 2025, when he put the overall strength of the Ukrainian armed forces at roughly 800,000 personnel.

Russian representatives, meanwhile, have repeatedly accused Kyiv of deliberately downplaying casualty numbers. In July, Kherson governor Vladimir Saldo argued that the Ukrainian government was concealing the true scale of losses to avoid paying compensation to families of the dead. A similar position was voiced by Zaporizhzhia governor Yevgeny Balitsky, who claimed that authorities were even leaving fallen soldiers’ bodies on the battlefield to withhold benefits.