Civilian casualties from February 24, 2022, when Russia launched its war against Ukraine, to 24:00 on March 17, 2022, were 2,149 civilians (the report a day earlier said 2,032), including 816 deaths (780), the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said Friday.
"The UN OHCHR believes that the real figures are significantly higher, especially in government-controlled territory, and especially in recent days, as information from some places where intense fighting has taken place is delayed and many reports are still awaiting confirmation," the document said.
According to it, this applies, for example, to Volnovakha and Mariupol (Donetsk Region), Izyum (Kharkiv Region), Severodonetsk and Rubizhne (Luhansk Region), Trostyanets (Sumy Region), where there are reports of numerous civilian casualties. They are subject to further verification and are not included in the above statistics.
"The majority of civilian deaths or injuries were caused by the use of explosive devices with a wide kill zone, including heavy artillery and multiple rocket launchers, as well as missile and air strikes," the report said.
The UN confirmed 142 men, 116 women, 16 boys and 7 girls were killed, while the gender of 36 children and 489 adults could not yet be determined.
Among the 1,333 wounded were 17 girls and 7 boys, and 50 children whose sex could not yet be determined.
Compared to the previous day, according to the UN, one more child was killed and six more were wounded.
The UN OHCHR indicates that as of midnight on March 18, there were 172 (162) deaths and 503 (472) injuries in government-controlled territory and 50 (46) deaths and 178 (174) injuries in territory controlled by self-proclaimed "republics" in Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
In other regions of Ukraine under government control (Kyiv, as well as Zhytomyr, Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv, Sumy, Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kharkiv, Kherson, Dnipropetrovsk, Cherkasy and Chernihiv regions), the UN recorded 594 (572) dead and 652 (606) wounded.
The summary also says that, according to the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, as of 8:00 a.m. on March 18, 109 children were killed and more than 130 were wounded.
In addition, OHCHR notes a report by the Kharkiv Oblast National Police according to which, as of 18:00 on 17 March, 250 (244) civilians, including 13 children, had been killed in the oblast.
The increase in the figures in this summary compared to the figures in the previous summary should not be attributed only to the new cases that took place on 17 March, as during the day, OHCHR also verified a number of cases from previous days, the document specifies.
