The civilian death toll in Ukraine has exceeded 1,000 since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said Thursday — warning that "the actual figures are considerably higher."
“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,” according to the OHCHR.
In a statement, the UN body detailed the 1,035 civilian deaths as “214 men, 160 women, 14 girls, and 28 boys, as well as 48 children and 571 adults whose sex is yet unknown.”
It added that at least 1,650 civilians have been injured since the start of the invasion.
In the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine, the OHCHR has recorded 311 civilian deaths and 857 civilians injured. In other regions, including the city of Kyiv, Cherkasy, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Kherson, Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk and Zhytomyr regions, 724 civilians have been killed and 793 injured.
“OHCHR believes that 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. This concerns, for example, Mariupol and Volnovakha (Donetsk region), Izium (Kharkiv region), Sievierodonetsk and Rubizhne (Luhansk region), and Trostianets (Sumy region), where there are allegations of numerous civilian casualties,” it said, CNN reports.
