The United Nations tally of civilian casualties in Ukraine since Russia invaded has surpassed 10,000, though the agency believes the number is significantly greater.
As of Feb. 24, the day Russia’s military crossed into Ukraine, 4,509 civilians have lost their lives, while another 5,585 have been wounded, according to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner’s Friday update. Nearly 300 children have been killed, and more than 450 children have been hurt.
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“The actual figures are considerably higher, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration,” the office’s daily disclosure reads, though it provides no range as to how high it thinks the number could be. “Most of the civilian casualties recorded were caused by the use of explosive weapons with a wide impact area, including shelling from heavy artillery and multiple launch rocket systems, and missile and air strikes.”
More than half of the civilians who were hurt or killed were in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, which are in the east and are at the center of the second phase of the war.
The war has created and worsened a humanitarian crisis for Ukrainian civilians. There have been more than 7.7 million border crossings from Ukraine into a neighboring country, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. UNICEF said at the beginning of the month 3 million children inside Ukraine are in need of humanitarian assistance, while another 2.2 million children who fled as refugees and successfully left are as well.
Russian troops have been accused of targeting civilians and of indiscriminately carrying out their military campaign in disregard of innocent lives and infrastructure. In multiple instances, their alleged crimes were only discovered after they vacated Ukrainian territory and local authorities could begin to assess the human and infrastructural damages.
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In some of their more heinous alleged acts, Russian forces have attacked more than 250 healthcare facilities. It’s reported they used mass graves to dispose of the bodies of people, including women and children, who were found in Bucha, some of whom had their hands tied behind their backs, while they also utilized “torture chambers” in the Russian-controlled city of Kherson, the latter of which was first reported by a U.S. official.
Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office has handed down eight indictments against Russian soldiers for alleged war crimes, and three of them have been convicted. Russian soldier Vadim Shishimarin will spend his life in prison for killing a Ukrainian man in the city of Sumy, while two others were sentenced to slightly more than a decade in prison for their role in firing rockets from Russia’s Belgorod region toward Kharkiv at the start of the war.
