The human cost of Russia’s war on Ukraine is rising with grim urgency. According to the UN’s human rights office (OHCHR), from the start of the Russian Federation’s armed attack on February 24th to April 5th, at least 3,776 Ukrainian civilians had been killed or wounded: 1,563 dead and 2,213 injured. Among the dead were men, women and children, though hundreds remained unclassified by sex, a reflection of the chaos enveloping the country.

The fighting’s impact has been sharpest in the embattled eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, which together accounted for 1,567 casualties. Elsewhere, across government-controlled territory stretching from Kyiv to Kharkiv and Odesa, a further 2,209 casualties were recorded, with over 1,000 of those proving fatal.

The chief instruments of this destruction have been explosive weapons of wide impact, including heavy artillery, multiple-launch rocket systems and air strikes — tools of war that make no meaningful distinction between soldier and civilian.

Yet as sobering as these figures are, the true toll is almost certainly far worse. The OHCHR candidly acknowledges that reporting from contested cities such as Mariupol, Volnovakha and Borodianka remains incomplete, delayed by the very hostilities that generated the casualties in the first place. Ukraine’s Prosecutor General separately reported that at least 167 children had been killed and 279 injured by early April 6th.

Painstakingly assembled through witness testimony, forensic records and cross-checked open-source material, these statistics represent a floor, not a ceiling.

Sources

• UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (OHCHR) — Civilian casualty figures covering February 24 through April 5
• Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office — Child casualty data as of April 6