The Belarusian Cyber Partisans’ tactics against Putin

Berlin. During the night of 31 October to 1 November, a banner in Belarusian appeared on the websites of Rosstat, the Russian Federal State Statistics Service: ‘No one will escape their responsibilities’. A register containing over 11 million death certificates was stolen from the agency’s internal system, from which staggering figures were reconstructed: between 390,000 and 450,000 Russian deaths linked to the war in Ukraine, the vast majority of whom were soldiers. Behind the hack are two anonymous groups: the pro-Ukrainian Silent Crow and the Belarusian group Belarusian Cyber Partisans.

The collaboration between Silent Crow and the Belarusian Cyber Partisans “was a genuine partnership, a 50-50 effort. Both groups gained access at the same time”, explains Yuliana Shemetovets, the sole official spokesperson for the Cyber Partisans. “The aim is to liberate Belarus. And since the full-scale war began, helping Ukraine has become another, very important objective, because it is linked to the liberation of Belarus,” says the spokesperson. And why hack Rosstat in particular? “Because it was within our reach. We have access, I would say, to multiple subsystems in Russia,” says Shemetovets.

The hacktivists “had been inside the network for 5–6 months and could have stayed there longer”, but it was decided to wind down the operation because “there are other priorities”. During those months, the activists say, they managed to gain control of around 25,000 computers belonging to the Russian agency, as well as the servers that determine who can access the network and what they can do: the keys to the entire system. “Documents. Databases. Everything, including material classified as a state secret. We’re not just destroying their systems. We’re reading their secrets,” the Cyber Partisans’ X account wrote on 1 November.

The number of Russian war dead had already been estimated by various analyses to be between 350,000 and 500,000. Bloomberg’s in-depth report then showed that the poorest areas of the Russian Federation are the ones that have suffered the most: from the start of the invasion until mid-2024, in the Siberian regions of Buryatia, Tuva and Transbaikalia, approximately one in three men aged 18–49 died in the war.

The Belarusian Cyber Partisans were formed on 5 September 2020, during the Lukashenko government’s violent crackdown on the country’s democratic opposition. During those days, “some of the group’s founders hacked into the Chamber of Commerce’s website and published a message calling on anyone willing to help the protesters to come forward”, explains Shemetovets, who is not personally a hacker and works as an IT project manager in the United States. “Belarus is famous for its IT specialists,” continues the spokesperson, and today a team “with a reputation” has been formed, comprising a “core group of around 30 people and a further 70–80 volunteers”.

The Cyber Partisans are also collaborating with and supporting the Belarusian opposition fighters who have joined the Ukrainian army, the Kastuś Kalinoŭski regiment. “We help them whenever we can. If they need data for an operation, we provide that too. We support all Belarusians who are helping Ukraine.” This collaboration and support may also extend to other Ukrainian groups and the security services, but they always emphasise their independence: “We do not answer to the Ukrainian army; we do not work for any of the Ukrainian security services,” Shemetovets clarifies.

The Cyber Partisans’ notorious reputation stretches back several years. In 2021, they hacked into the databases of the Belarusian Ministry of the Interior. In 2022, they targeted the Belarusian railways to slow down the movement of Moscow’s troops towards Ukraine, and in November of the same year, they stole over 2 terabytes of data from the General Radio Frequency Centre of Roskomnadzor, the Russian censorship authority. In 2024, they made public the database of the KGB website, the Belarusian secret service. In July 2025, working with Silent Crow, they partially paralysed the Russian state-owned airline Aeroflot.

Last July, Russia declared the Cyber Partisans to be extremists and banned them. The group commented: “This is recognition by the Russian Z-dictatorship of the effectiveness of our work. We shall carry on as before!” On 12 November, the group also published confidential estimates from Rosstat on the population of the occupied Ukrainian territories – data that Moscow has been concealing since the invasion. Regarding future developments, spokesperson Shemetovets declined to provide details but assured us that the Cyber Partisans are continuing their work.