According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), since February 24, 2022, at least 10,582 civilians were killed in Ukraine during the first two years of the war, and another 19,875 were injured. 

 

587 of those killed and 1,298 of those injured were children.

 

Among adults, 5,017 men and 3,093 women were killed.

 

Crucially, this is only a small part of the overall civilian death toll caused by Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

 

The OHCHR figures do not include deaths that occurred in areas of Ukraine now occupied by Russia.

 

"The actual numbers are likely significantly higher," the OHCHR said.

 

The death toll in areas such as Mariupol, Lysychansk, Popasna and Sievierodonetsk are simply not known.

 

In Mariupol alone, the OHCHR has verified only 1,348 civilian deaths. 

 

"With the city still under Russian occupation and much of the physical evidence destroyed, the full death toll may never be known," Human Rights Watch said in a report in February 2024.

Serhiy Mikheev, 68. Yahidne, Chernihiv region. July 10, 2023. 
 Mikheev and his family moved to Yahidne in 1966 and two years later had built their own house. Today, all that remains of their home is the basement in which they took shelter from Russian shelling. They were among those taken by gunpoint to the basement of the local school where they were held captive and beaten with assault rifles. Mikheev says the only thing that stopped him suffering horrific internal injuries were the two layers of quilted jackets he was wearing. Nineteen people including nine children – one only two-and-a-half months old – were held in a room with no windows, light or heating and made candles out of beeswax to alleviate the conditions. They only had four packets of baby food and managed to extract some honeycomb from the wax. “We all survived,” he says, adding: “It is impossible to describe 27 days of nightmare and abuse.”

Lilia Kutsenko, 72. Irpin, Kyiv region. April 11, 2022. On March 6, Lilia Kutsenko heard the sound of breaking glass. A bullet had come through her window and into her fridge. Then a Russian tank drove into her garden. Soldiers came into her house saying they were looking for Ukrainian nationalists. Her neighbor was killed in her own garden. The soldiers told Kutsenko they wanted to set up positions around her house. “Are you going to hide behind a paralyzed old man and an old woman?” she asked them. Three weeks later her husband died due to a lack of medical care. In the fall of 2023, Lilia Kutsenko also passed away.

Yuriy Baranovych, 39. Yahidne, Chernihiv region. May 24, 2022. 
Yuriy Baranovych was one of the villagers who spent nearly a month in a school basement in the village of Yahidne. “The people spent 25 days sitting on chairs, it was impossible to lie down. The skin on their feet cracked,” he says. Their Russian captors allowed them outside to collect the bodies of civilians killed in the village. “I found 13 bodies around the village and we buried them in the cemetery,” he says. After 20 minutes of digging graves, the Russian soldiers opened fire on them. “Yuriy Predko's father was wounded in the leg and his daughter Angela was shot in the back,” he says.

Raisa Korzh, 65. Lisove, Kyiv region.
June 1, 2022. Raisa Korzh was at home in the village of Lisove, around 110 kilometers north-west of Kyiv, when three armored vehicles carrying about 30 Russian soldiers drove into her yard. They looted and burned other houses in the village so Korzh got on her knees and begged them to spare her home. Three of them entered her house. They ate the syrniki (cottage cheese pancakes) she had just cooked then broke her furniture and shot her TV with an assault rifle. She stood in the corner, praying they would not kill her. Suddenly something hit her in the arm from behind – a soldier had stabbed her with a bayonet. He then hit her across the head with a hammer, trying to get her to give them the keys to her quad bike. She didn’t have the keys and she was beaten for three hours. Today, Korzh has no use of her left hand.

Serhiy Hrenyuk, 40. Moshchun, Kyiv region. May 4, 2022. Bus driver Serhiy Hrenyuk was in his yard with his friend – also named Serhiy – on March 16 when three Russian soldiers entered his yard and opened fire. His friend was killed and Serhiy was wounded in the shoulder, arm and leg. In horrific pain and unable to move, he lay on his doorstep where he’d fallen for six days until Ukrainian soldiers found him. “You have nine lives, like a cat,” they told him. Just five meters from his front door there is still a shallow hole where his friend was buried before being given a proper burial in the local cemetery a few days ago.

Maria Krasnotal, 65. Novoselivka, Chernihiv region. May 27, 2022. I met Maria Krasnotal where her house used to stand on 7 Kuvitchenko Street. She showed me the cellar where her 40-year-old son was killed by a Russian bomb on March 16 as he sheltered with his wife and sister. Two days previously, Krasnotal had gone to visit relatives in another village. Russian forces bombed the village every day from March 5 and there was no light, gas or water. Krasnotal baked bread in an old wood-burning brick oven. After her son was killed, she remembered what her father, a veteran of the Second World War who was awarded the Order of the Red Star used to say: "Time will pass and you will remember it as kazka-bayka (Ukrainian word for fairy tale).” We talked for a long time, but she did not want to be photographed. She felt that no one needed her grief. But when I said that it was not for us, but for next generations and it should be in a book to be shown to the world, she agreed. "I want to buy this book from you one day," she said as we parted.

Mykola Keush, 61. Zalissia, Kyiv region. April 27, 2022. 
Mykola Keush spent the entirety of the Russian occupation of Zalissia in his home, praying to God to survive as the four houses around him were destroyed. A neighbor’s house across the road was hit by a shell, killing her and her dog. Another neighbor was wounded by shrapnel and died ten days later. Russian soldiers parked tanks and fuel trucks in his garden. At one point a Russian soldier in a black uniform pointed an assault rifle at him and said if he left the house he would be shot. "Shoot me on my own land. Haven't you been killed enough in Afghanistan? Why the hell did you come to our land?" he replied.

Vira Ivashchenko, 60. Zalissia, Kyiv region. April 27, 2022.
 Vira Ivashchenko’s father built her home in 1972. When the Russians occupied Zalissia, they parked tanks in her yard, dug trenches and set up their headquarters in the house next door. Russian soldiers looted the village. The skin of the neighbor’s dog which they ate still hangs on the fence. They shot her cat. After three weeks of occupation, Ivashchenko and her friend escaped to a neighboring village, reading a prayer book as they walked. Ivashchenko’s home was destroyed when the village was liberated – all that is left are walls and a stove. “We don't blame our Ukrainian soldiers, it was necessary to defeat this monster,” she says. Ivashchenko still tends to her vegetable garden and gives homemade tinned food to anyone who visits. It’s all she has left.

Oleh Valovy, 54. Horenka, Kyiv region. April 3, 2022. Armed with his own double-barrelled hunting rifle, Oleh Valovy formed his own small private army of 12 men to defend his village of Horenka. Soon there were 24 of them as men returned after evacuating their families. He taught them how to use weapons, how to behave under fire and how to build defensive positions. For more than 40 days they evacuated people and extinguished fires. At first they just used buckets and spades but later converted a sanitation truck into a fire engine. They’ve saved dozens of homes.

Nadiya Vasylyeva, 83. Irpin, Kyiv region. May 22, 2022. Nadiya Vasylyeva was born near Minsk, Belarus in 1939. She remembers the gunshots, explosions and fires of the Second World War. She remembers how her mother shielded her while lying in fields when aircraft appeared in the sky. She remembers how her mother joined a partisan unit and was then captured and executed by the Germans in 1942. Eighty years later, she once again heard explosions. One was a Russian shell that hit her house, razing it to the ground along with all of her documents and belongings. She hid in her barn with her dogs as her home burned. For three months and with no home or electricity, she wore the same clothes every day as she tended her chickens and cooked her meals outside over an open fire. Eventually volunteers managed to build her a new house on her land.

Viktor Klymenko, 76. Andriivka, Kyiv region. April 29, 2022. Russian soldiers occupied Viktor Klymenko’s house so he and his wife lived in the cellar. A blind man was burned alive in a neighboring house and young people were killed in the street. The soldiers grilled shashlik, drank vodka and then, just for fun, they slaughtered all the animals. They defecated on the floor of the house and even on the sofa. They looted the village and bags of stolen possessions including a gas cooker were taken away on tanks. They were sending them to their relatives in the Far East, they explained. When they retreated, they mined the roads, later killing several electricians. During the occupation of Andriivka in February and March, Russian soldiers killed 14 civilians. Three more were killed by bombing.

Hanna Trepak, 85. Yahidne, Chernihiv region. May 24, 2022. 
 Aged just four when the Second World War began, 85-year-old Hanna Trepak has known a lifetime of conflict, turmoil and hardship, and Russia’s full-scale invasion brought only more suffering. Held in the school basement in Yahidne, she and four others were squeezed into an area just one meter square. With no ventilation it became almost suffocating. The skin on their feet cracked. Some of the other elderly people slowly went mad. Her neighbor, 88-year-old Makater Polyna died in that basement.

Mykola Vizer, 46. Moshchun, Kyiv region. May 4, 2022. Mykola Vizer is the Pastor of The Church of St. John the Evangelist in the village of Moshchun. "On the 24th of February 2022, we heard the sound of strong explosions. Several shells hit the church and shrapnel pierced the walls,” he says, adding that only one icon was damaged. At his house, shells caused several craters around his house but the one that made a direct hit lay unexploded on the roof. “It is God’s work,” he says.

Lyudmila Krasnotal​, 68 Novoselivka, Chernihiv region. May 27, 2022. Lyudmila Krasnotal​ and her husband Mykola​ have been living together for 49 years in the village of Novoselivka, in the Chernihiv region. Russian forces bombed their village every day from March 5. They had no gas, water or electricity and survived on bread she baked in a wood-burning oven. Lyudmila later decided to move to a safer place but Mykola stayed at the house because their cow had recently given birth. He went out regularly to check on the new calf but one day was injured by shelling. He lost his hearing but he stayed in the house, sleeping on a bed by the window. Before the Russians retreated from the village, they came to the house and stole all of Mykola’s clothes and shoes. Lyudmila died in January 2024.

Mykola Dmytrenko, 60. Kozarovychi, Kyiv region. May 9, 2022.
 On March 5, 2022, Mykola Dmytrenko was cooking in his kitchen when suddenly a massive explosion shook his house. A Russian helicopter shot down by Ukrainian forces, had crashed to earth in his yard. Within 40 minutes, his house and everything he owned were destroyed in the ensuing fire. He and his wife were forced to live in their basement, the only part that remained habitable. Russian soldiers entered his courtyard twice. The first time they opened the door to the cellar and shouted down asking if anyone was there. They sat in silence, terrified the soldiers would throw a grenade in. The second time, soldiers asked them where their children were. "We don't have any children,” Dmytrenko replied. He lied, not mentioning his two sons both serving in Ukraine’s armed forces lest the soldiers punish them.

Iryna Anikeyenko, 52. Yahidne, Chernihiv region. July 8, 2023. When the village of Yahidne was being bombed, Anikeyenko and eight others – including her 75-year-old mother and a six month-old baby – took shelter in the basement of a house. “The candles were smoking and we could hardly breathe,” she says. They made the decision that they would split up, a few sheltering in the basement and a few in the house so that “if some of us were buried, the others could dig us out.” When Russian troops occupied the village, they threw bread at the starving civilians and filmed them while laughing. Some of the villagers were shot in the legs. Anikeyenko had to stop one drunk Russian soldier from choking her mother to death. She succeeded but her mother died shortly after the occupation ended.

Bohdan Zarytskyi, 31. Defender of Azovstal, Mariupol. March 16, 2023. 
For 82 days, 31-year-old Bohdan Zarytskyi and his fellow soldiers resisted the Russian siege of the Azovstal factory in the city of Mariupol, sheltering in the basement of the sprawling complex in increasingly dire conditions. Speaking to his girlfriend Natasha who was in Kyiv, he said: “Natasha, I would even shoot myself if there was such an order, it would be an easy decision, probably the easiest. The only thing that stopped me and my brothers in arms was that the state would not pay compensation to our families.” On April 17, they got married as he sheltered in Azovstal, and she sheltered in a basement in Kyiv. After 82 days Zarytskyi was among those defenders taken into Russian captivity where their suffering continued. The most painful torture was starvation, and every day men fainted with hunger in the prison yard. Confined in an eighteen meter cell with 27 other prisoners, it was impossible to lie down and they could only take turns to sit on the two benches four at a time, and only fit because they were all so skinny. Zarytsky lost 43 kilograms in weight. He was released on September 21, 2022. Miraculously, he managed to save some of his most prized possessions – his German and English textbooks.

Lyudmyla Huseynova, 61. Novoazovsk, Donetsk region. July 30, 2023. Lyudmyla Huseynova is a public Ombudsman for children's rights in some districts of the Donetsk region and spent three years and thirteen days in Russian captivity. After the start of hostilities in 2014, she helped children from the Novoazovsk boarding school and regularly collected humanitarian aid for them. She was arrested in October 2019 on “charges of espionage, extremism and terrorism.” She spent 40 days in a secret isolation prison before being moved to the Donetsk pre-trial detention center. There she was regularly tortured. Her captors would put a bag over her head and force her to squat naked. She spent two days with her eyes and hands bound with tape, without food or water. She did not know until the last moment that she was going to be released in a prisoner exchange.

Volodymyr Zhayvoronok, 49. Enerhodar, Zaporizhia region. December 6, 2022. Volodymyr Zhayvoronok was held captive by Russian forces because he expressed pro–Ukrainian views. After being beaten and detained while at his neighbor’s house, he was taken to a prison where 20 people were held in a cell designed for six. “When there were 12 people left in the cell, we thought it was heaven,” he says. Upon arriving he saw a man he knew, Andriy Honcharuk. “He had literally lost his mind, he was hallucinating. He was tortured to death,” he says. Zhayvoronok saw four people being tortured to death in a chamber above his cell. “Everything was covered in blood and the walls were riddled with bullet holes. I was shot only in the side, but the others were shot five or six times in the arms and legs,” he says.

Valentyna Lukyanenko, 61.​ Kukhary, Kyiv region. May 9, 2022.
 Valentyna Lukyanenko spent her entire life building her house in the village of Kukhary. At first, the Russians left the village alone but then planes taking off from Belarus began to bomb them. “Only the cellar of the house was left,” she says.

Yuriy Ignat​yev, 43. Kukhari, Kyiv region. May 9, 2022. For the first three weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Yuriy Ignat​yev stayed in the village of Kukhari under intense Russian bombardment. Then a Russian plane dropped a 500kg bomb next to the house in which he was staying. The blast threw him violently into the wall. The crater outside was seven meters deep.

Halyna Kowalska, 67. Irpin, Kyiv region. June 3, 2022. Halyna Kowalska refused to be evacuated from Irpin because of the stray animals she was caring for. Just seven people remained in the multi-storey residential building in which she lived, all sheltering on the ground floor between two load-bearing walls during Russian shelling. Electricity was limited and there was no gas so they cooked outside over an open fire. On March 15 the shelling was particularly intense. A 37-year-old woman cooking food for her child was killed. During the Russian occupation of Irpin, six teenage Russian soldiers entered her flat. “Go back to your mother and father,” she told them. She was so traumatized that she developed a stutter for two weeks afterwards. The building in which she lived was later demolished. In the photo, she clutches the coat left by a Ukrainian soldier.

Valery Dushyn, 62. Hostomel, Kyiv region. April 8, 2022.
 On the morning of the invasion, Valery Dushyn took refuge in his basement as explosions rang out and Russian fighter jets flew overhead. Russian soldiers broke into his building and took over the flats. “But as soon as the Ukrainian army began to attack, everything turned around,” he says. “The ‘brave’ Russian paratroopers occupied the basements where we had been hiding. “They locked the residents in their own flats and propped up the doors so that we could not leave.”

Yevheniya Ushakova, 27. Zaitseve, Donetsk region. March 18, 2023. Yevheniya, her two children and her husband were trying to leave Zaitseve for Bakhmut when their car exploded on a landmine. For three hours, rescuers were unable to get closer to the place of the tragedy. Their six-year-old daughter died on the spot, their three-year-old son was injured in the head and arm. Yevheniya herself lost an arm and suffered numerous wounds. Her husband, Victor, was in a coma for two days. Later they found out that a few hours after they had left Zaitseve, a Russian shell hit and destroyed their home.

Volodymyr Koval, 68. Irpin, Kyiv region. February 12, 2023. 
During the occupation of Irpin, Volodymyr Koval spent weeks listening to the sounds of shells flying over his house and machine gun fire in the streets. One day he was looking at three plumes of black smoke where Ukrainian forces had destroyed Russian vehicles nearby. When he went back inside his house, a massive explosion tore his door off its hinges. “If it had happened a minute earlier, we would not be talking now," he says. Due to a back injury, Koval couldn’t go up and down to his basement. When a neighbor’s house was hit and destroyed, he thought: “If I'm going to die, I want to die in my own home.” He went to bed and covered himself with three blankets. His house is now covered in shrapnel marks. The electricity is often cut off and there is no hot water or heating. The temperature inside the house is two degrees centigrade. In the kitchen he can turn on the stove and heat up the room to ten degrees. When Spring arrives, he will be able to take a shower.

Hanna Okhonya, 65. Novoselivka, Chernihiv region. May 28, 2022. 
“We stayed at home from February 24 to March 11, while the Russians shelled us from the neighboring occupied village of Kyselivka,” Hanna Okhonya says. “We escaped the shelling in the cellar with our daughter-in-law, our son and our grandson, who is nine-years-old and has asthma. It was the worst when he was suffocating and the shells exploded above our heads.” In the photo Okhonya is holding a coat that she and her grandson used to keep warm.
 “Russian tanks stood in our village cemetery”, Okhonya says, adding: “There was no peace then, neither for the living nor for the dead.”
 She now rents an apartment because her house was completely destroyed.

Mykhailo Misyura, 66. Yahidne, Chernihiv region. July 8, 2023. 
In the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the village of Yahidne was captured and occupied by Russian troops. More than 360 men, women, children and elderly were rounded up by soldiers and held captive in the basement of a local school for nearly a month, from the 3rd to the 31st of March. "We will execute everyone who has a mobile phone,” they told the villagers. Despite the threat, Misyura managed to hide one while held captive. The unsanitary conditions and the lack of fresh air meant at least ten elderly people died in the basement. Ukraine suspects soldiers of the 55th brigade of the Russian army were responsible for these crimes.

Valentyna Yarosh, 69. Novyi Bykiv, Chernihiv region. April 14, 2022. The village of Novyi Bykiv survived more than a month of Russian occupation, but at a terrible cost. Soldiers took over the local school, hospital, kindergarten and set up their headquarters in the bomb shelter of the village club. They entrenched themselves among civilians, setting up gun placements right next to people’s homes. They imprisoned at least 40 civilians in a torture chamber in the basement of a boiler house. When they began to retreat in the face of Ukraine’s armed forces on 29-30 March, the Russian soldier guarding it began to take out the prisoners and shoot them, later confessing to killing at least four people. When they liberated the village, Ukrainian forces hit the Russians so hard they set up a mobile crematorium on the outskirts of the village to burn the corpses of killed Russian soldiers.

Borys Havrylyuk, 82. Irpin, Kyiv region. May 22, 2022. 
 Borys Havrylyuk spent his childhood living under German occupation near Kyiv during the Second World War. At the other end of his life, he experienced it once again, only this time under the Russians. He stayed in Irpin because he could not leave his goats. Despite everything, Borys considers himself a rich man because he always has milk and a son to help him.

Yaroslava Bordun, 78. Irpin, Kyiv region. May 22, 2022. 
Yaroslava Bordun always thought her three-room apartment in Irpin would be where she and her family would live out their years, but it was burnt to the ground when a Russian shell hit the entrance to the building. Her daughter and granddaughter had managed to leave when the bombing started but her husband was too frail to move on his own. Fortunately they found a car. “We took him on a stretcher to the destroyed bridge over the Irpin River,” she says. “An ambulance took him to the other side.” Yaroslava’s husband died later in hospital. “I cried a lot at the end... I have no idea where I will get money for a new flat.”

Kostiantyn Momotov, 68. Bucha, Kyiv region. May 31, 2022.
 Kostiantyn Momotov spoke to some of the young Russian soldiers who occupied Bucha when one day they came into his garden. “Aren’t you afraid of dying?” he asked them. “Yes, we are,” they replied. “Then surrender.” he told them. “We cannot,” they said, shortly before their officer took them away. Momotov lives on Vokzalna Street where a Russian convoy was destroyed by Ukrainian forces on February 27. Pictures of the burned out vehicles were seen all over the world. Momotov’s house miraculously survived though the bodies of dead Russian soldiers and destroyed vehicles littered the street outside. He had no electricity or heating for weeks afterwards and cooked his food outside on an open fire. During the occupation, Russian soldiers killed his neighbor in his car as it stood in his yard.