Ukraine: Counting the human cost of the war
Ukraine since the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians have lost their lives.
The exact number of casualties is impossible to establish, with both sides giving little information about their losses, to avoid undermining morale among the troops and wider public.
The UN's human rights office said in mid-January it had confirmed the deaths of 10,382 civilians in Ukraine and a further 19,659 injured since Russia's invasion but that the real number was likely higher.
The number of civilian casualties increased significantly in December 2023 and January 2024 compared with previous months, reversing a trend of decreasing civilian casualties earlier in the year, it said.
Nearly 8,000 of the deaths were in Ukraine-controlled territory and more than 2,000 in zones occupied by Russia.
Ukraine's national police has recorded nearly 10,000 civilian deaths, along with 7,000 missing and 11,000 injured in the territory it controls, according to an official on January 31.
But Ukrainian authorities say thousands more civilians were killed during the siege of the southern port city of Mariupol in the early months of war, before it was taken over by Russia.
A town hall official told Ukrainian television in February 2023 that at least 25,000 civilians had been buried in mass graves there.
Across the Russian border, at least 138 civilians have been killed, according to the Russian news site 7x7.
The military on both sides has kept its casualty figures under wraps due to their
