GENEVA: Civilian casualties in the war raging between Russia and Ukraine rose 37 percent in the first half of this year, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

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 percent increase from the same period in the previous year 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 this month in Kyiv that hit a residential complex, collapsing an entire section of the building and killing 19 civilians and injuring 76 others.

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 this year. “This represents a 121pc 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 frontline 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.

Published in Dawn, July 22nd, 2026