UN signals major rise in Ukraine-Russia war civilian deaths, injuries

GENEVA – Civilian casualties in the war raging between Russia and Ukraine rose 37 per cent in the first half of 2026, the United Nations said July 21.

Russia and Ukraine – who both deny targeting civilians – have stepped up daily strikes on each other in recent months, as US-led talks on ending the nearly four-and-a-half year conflict remain stalled.

Danielle Bell, head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, told reporters in Geneva that the unit documented 1,396 civilians killed and 7,978 injured.

That was a 37 per cent increase from the same period in 2025 and “almost doubled what we documented in 2024”, she said.

Bell said the escalation was in part being driven by increasing use of long-range ballistic missiles and drones, “affecting densely populated urban areas that are far away from the front line”.

She pointed for instance to a missile strike earlier in July in Kyiv that hit a residential complex, collapsing an entire section of the building and killing 19 civilians and injuring 76 others.

Call for investigations

Bell said there appeared to also be a significant increase in civilian casualties taking place in Russia as a consequence of Ukraine’s increasing use of long-range weapons firing into the country.

Pointing to credible Russian open-source reporting, she said 250 civilians had been killed and 1,596 injured in attacks inside Russia during the first six months of 2026.

“This represents a 121 per cent increase in civilian casualties in the Russian Federation compared with last year,” she said.

The second driver of the swelling civilian casualty toll was the widespread use of short-range drones and glide bombs in front-line areas, Bell said.

She highlighted in particular the impact of so-called first-person view drones (FPVs), where the drone operator can see the target in real time.

“In the first six months of this year, civilian casualties from short-range drones increased by 65 per cent,” she said, lamenting that “these drones are fundamentally changing civilian life in front-line communities”.

During recent visits to Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Kharkiv and Dnipro, Bell said people had told her team that they feel “tracked by FPV drones while carrying out ordinary daily activities: gardening, walking their dogs, feeding their animals outside, going to the store, driving or simply walking or cycling outdoors”.

UN Human Rights Office spokesman Thameen Al-Kheetan told reporters that “civilians and civilian infrastructure are strictly protected under international humanitarian law, and any such deliberate attack is a war crime”.

“There needs to be investigations in all attacks, both in Ukraine and in Russia, where civilians were impacted, killed, or injured, in order to determine the responsibilities and to achieve accountability and justice,” he insisted. AFP