The UN has denounced the loss of civilian life caused by the Russian offensive in Ukraine, as the fighting crosses the 500-day mark.
More than 9,000 civilians, including 500 children, have been killed since the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said in a statement on Friday, although UN representatives previously said the true number was likely much higher.
The average number of victims is on the rise again
“Today we mark another grim milestone in the war that continues to take a horrific toll on Ukrainian civilians,” said Noël Calhoun, deputy head of the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine in a statement. press release Friday, 500th day since February 24, 2022.
While this year the death toll averaged lower than in 2022, it started to rise again in May and June, observers noted. On June 27, 13 civilians, including four children, were killed in a missile strike on Kramatorsk in eastern Ukraine.
Far from the front line, in the western city of Lviv, ten people were killed in an early Thursday bombardment that the mayor described as the biggest attack on civilian infrastructure since the start of the invasion. 42 people were injured in the same attack, including three children, according to a report from the Ukrainian Ministry of the Interior released Friday morning.
Boutcha and Mariupol in symbols
UNESCO said the attack was also the first to occur in an area protected by the World Heritage Convention and damaged a historic building.
The cities of Boutcha (in the north of the country, not far from the capital Kiev) and Mariupol (south-east) have become symbols of the atrocities of the conflict last year, and for which Russia has been accused of war crimes and genocides.
In the once sleepy town of Boutcha, AFP journalists discovered in April a street littered with corpses wearing civilian clothes.
Satellite images later showed that several bodies had been lying on the ground since mid-March, when the city was under Russian control, with Ukrainian authorities claiming that hundreds of people had been killed in Buchha by Moscow forces which were retreating.