WASHINGTON — White House envoy Jared Kushner said Saturday he is working with Russia, Ukraine and European governments to move the stalled push to end the war in Ukraine into "the next stage," as newly leaked data from Russia's own statistics agency suggested the Kremlin's death toll from the war may be far higher than previously documented.

Speaking after a week of shuttle diplomacy, Kushner said he and fellow envoy Steve Witkoff are now trying to arrange direct engagement between European governments and Moscow — a track Kyiv and its allies have long demanded but Russia has resisted. Per Al Jazeera's reporting from Washington, Kushner indicated NATO would ultimately provide Ukraine's security guarantees in any settlement, though he offered no detailed blueprint for how Europe-Russia talks would actually be structured.

A Grim New Number, Heavily Disputed

The diplomatic push comes as two hacking groups, Silent Crow and the Belarusian Cyber Partisans, say they breached servers belonging to Russia's Federal State Statistics Service, Rosstat, and found mortality records suggesting the war has killed far more Russian soldiers than Moscow has ever acknowledged. The Belarusian group counted at least 393,881 deaths it could tie directly to military operations, while Silent Crow's broader count — folding in non-combat military deaths and records with unspecified causes — reached roughly 450,100.

Rosstat has confirmed it was targeted by cyberattacks between Oct. 29 and Nov. 1 but says it has found no evidence any database was actually compromised. Russia has not published official combat-casualty figures since September 2022 and treats military losses as a state secret, making independent verification difficult. By comparison, independent outlets Mediazona and BBC Russian have verified 285,881 Russian deaths by name through obituaries and public records as of Nov. 6 — a more conservative floor both outlets believe undercounts the true toll.

"EUROPE MUST STATE CLEARLY WHAT IT WANTS."

French President Emmanuel Macron, writing on X, said Europe needs to spell out its own terms for the war's endgame, including what it expects from Russia, and argued Ukraine — which fields Europe's largest conventional army — must have a central role alongside NATO in any settlement. On Friday, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom agreed to send representatives to future peace talks, formalizing a European seat at the table that had been informal until now.

The diplomatic track remains fragile. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said this week that US negotiators had asked, during talks in Abu Dhabi, whether Kyiv would withdraw from the Donbas region in exchange for NATO membership — a trade Zelensky has not accepted. The Kremlin has signaled openness to talking with European governments but has criticized the bloc for not yet putting forward concrete proposals of its own.

What's Next

Kushner and Witkoff have not announced a date for the next round of multilateral talks, though US officials say "substantive plans" for next steps were discussed during this month's Moscow meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Ukraine, meanwhile, continues to resist ceding additional territory, leaving the war's most contentious issue unresolved heading into what both sides describe as a decisive winter.