How Many Civilians Has Russia’s War Killed in Ukraine?

So far, each day of September 2024 and throughout the end of August 2024, Ukraine has been subjected to a barrage of Russian airstrikes. Dozens of children have been killed or injured. 

A Russian missile strike in Poltava on September 3 killed 54 and injured 297 people, Ukraine’s State Emergency Service reported. Search and rescue operations are continuing in the area and it’s expected that the death toll will rise. 

A Russian missile strike killed 7 people, including one child, and 64 others were injured in the city of Lviv on September 4.

Russian forces attacked the city of Kharkiv on August 30, killing 7 people, including one girl aged 14. A total of 27 people, including 18 children were injured. On August 26, Russians killed 7 people and injured 47 others, including 4 children.

Between August 17 and 23, Russian shelling and airstrikes killed at least 31 civilians in Donetsk, Kharkiv, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions, reported Reliefweb.

These are just a handful of attacks that Ukrainian civilians have endured over the last week. The death toll of civilians in Ukraine continues to significantly rise, daily.

A total of 35,160 civilian casualties during Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, from February 24, 2022, to July 31, 2024, have been verified.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

Of them, 11,520 civilians have been killed, 633 of those killed were children. A total of 23,640 people were reported to have been injured, of whom 1,551 injured were children. 

The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) cautions that the actual figure is likely to be significantly higher given the challenges they required for verification. 

It's also vital to note the onslaught of attacks by Russian forces throughout August 2024 to the current date making their figures already out of date. 

Most verified civilian casualties occur in Ukrainian government-controlled territory. It is almost impossible to verify all civilian deaths and injuries in temporary Russian-occupied territories until they have been liberated by Ukrainian Forces. Even then, there will be some challenges. 

In the Bucha massacre, for example, it was reported that an estimated 420 civilians had been killed by Russian Forces. This was not known until the area was liberated by Ukrainian Forces and mass burials were uncovered. 

We estimate that at least 10,284 people died in Mariupol, buried between 5 cemeteries during the first year of the full-scale war.

Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch states however that this figure is significantly higher and note that it is unclear how many people killed were civilians or within the military.

Many witnesses of abuses committed against civilians that remain in Mariupol can not speak about their experiences without risk. Much of the physical evidence of crimes committed is likely to be destroyed, making a death toll difficult to establish. Civilians that were killed may be placed in makeshift graves within the city and bodies buried under rubble may never be found. 

Human Rights Watch, via satellite imagery, found singular graves being dug and counted them individually. 

They also found rows of trench-style graves stretching between 10 and 70 meters with small wooden plaques placed on the mound. To count these, they assumed that each small plaque represented one body.

More burials were found in a local park, the Mariupol Council reported in March 2024. It is not known who they are, whether they are civilians, Russian or Ukrainian forces. 

There are 42,000 citizens registered as missing in Ukraine as of July 2024. This figure is a combination of both military and civilians, Dmytro Bohatiuk, the head of the Interior Ministry's missing persons department said.

This number does not include the estimated 19,500 children that have been forcibly kidnapped and related to Russia, occupied territories, or Belarus.

The true extent of civilian deaths caused by the Russian Federation is not known. Only when the war is over will the world know the true extent of Russia’s slaughter against the civilian population of Ukraine.