Ukraine war: civilian death toll tops 8,300 after 9 months of conflict
- The actual number of victims is likely to be higher, authorities said. The death toll includes more than 400 children
- Ukrainian authorities have so far registered more than 45,000 war crimes, with ‘hundreds of thousands’ of people reportedly deported to Russia
Among them were 437 children, Ukrainian Attorney General Andriy Kostin was cited as saying in a report on Sunday by the UNIAN news agency.
More than 11,000 people have been injured in the war, which has lasted almost nine months.
According to Kostin, the actual number of victims is likely to be higher because Ukrainian authorities do not yet have access to some areas of the country being occupied by Russia.
Ukrainian troops continue to find bodies and evidence of suspected atrocities in the regions they have liberated.
The Ukrainian authorities have so far registered more than 45,000 war crimes, with 216 people reported as suspected war criminals, including 17 Russian prisoners of war, it has been revealed. Twelve of the 60 accused were convicted.
Ukraine’s human rights official denies its forces executed Russian prisoners
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that since the war began in February, Russia has already fired some 4,700 missiles at targets in his country.
“Hundreds of our cities have been practically burned down, thousands of people have been killed, hundreds of thousands have been deported to Russia,” Zelensky said on Sunday in a video message to the International Organisation of French-speaking Countries, whose representatives were meeting in Djerba, Tunisia.
“And millions of people have left Ukraine to seek shelter from war in other countries.”
As a result of these attacks, more than 20 million people were temporarily without electricity, Zelensky said, as he asked the member states of the French-speaking organisation for help.
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Zelensky said Russian forces launched “almost 400 artillery attacks” on Sunday, with “the fiercest battles” being in the Donetsk region.
Kyiv said on Saturday that about 60 Russian soldiers had been killed in a long-range artillery attack in the south, the second time in four days that Ukraine has claimed to have inflicted major casualties in a single incident.
Oleh Zhdanov, a military analyst based in Kyiv, said that according to his information, offensive battles were taking place on the Bakhmut and Avdiivka frontline in the Donetsk region, among others.
“The enemy is trying to break through our defences, to no avail,” Zhdanov said in a social media video. “We fight back – they suffer huge losses.”
He said both armies are focused on regrouping. Ukrainian forces are being moved towards Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv, among others. Russian troops are regrouping to the Zaporizhzhia direction and Donetsk and Luhansk.
Russia’s defence ministry said on Sunday that up to 50 Ukrainian servicemen were killed in the previous day along the southern Donetsk frontline and 50 others elsewhere. In total, 153 areas of concentration of Ukraine’s manpower and military equipment were destroyed on Saturday.
Neither the Ukrainian nor Russian reports could be independently verified.
Russia calls its invasion in Ukraine a “special operation” to demilitarise and “denazify” its neighbour, not a war. Kyiv and its allies say the invasion is an unprovoked war of aggression.
Additional reporting by Reuters
