At least 10,749 Ukrainian civilians, including 499 children, have been killed since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion, Yurii Bielousov, the head of the War Crimes Department of Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office, said in an Aug. 2 interview with Interfax Ukraine.
Another 15,599 civilians have been recorded as wounded, of which 1,900 were children. More than 19,500 Ukrainian children have been identified by the Ukrainian government as forcibly deported to the territory of Russia since February 2022.
After occupied territories are liberated, the number of those killed "will increase many times," he expects. "I think that there will be tens of thousands of dead in Mariupol alone," Bielousov added.
Mariupol had a population of half a million people before Russia conducted siege warfare against the population and captured it in May 2022. Satellite imagery has shown evidence of mass graves around the city.
After the Ukrainian liberation of Izium in Kharkiv Oblast in September 2022, hundreds of bodies in mass graves were discovered, most of which were civilians.
Commenting on the difficulty of identifying bodies in such situations, Bielousov thanked his team's partners for the improvement of identification systems. The use of DNA analysis and number of laboratories is "incomparable to what we had before," he said.
Bielousov said that the figures of the Prosecutor General's Office are similar to those of the international organizations like the United Nations.
On July 7, the UN reported that it had confirmed the deaths of more than 9,000 civilians, including over 500 children, but that the real number is expected to be higher.
The UN report added that three times as many civilians were killed in the 500 days of the full-scale invasion as during the entire previous 8 years of war perpetrated by Russia in Ukraine's east.
Elsa Court
(Updated: )
