At least 940 children have been killed as a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Meduza found after a study of open-source data from international organizations, Ukrainian and Russian authorities, reports from relatives of the dead, and other sources. They found that at least 873 children have been killed in internationally recognized Ukrainian territory, including regions occupied by Russia, and another 67 inside Russia. The researchers stress that this is a minimum estimate: the real number of fatalities is significantly higher, as many cases still cannot be verified.
For the count of the dead in Ukraine, the journalists took data from the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission, which had confirmed the deaths of 835 children as of Aug. 31, 2026. Meduza additionally established another 38 cases that occurred or were identified after that date but before Oct. 9. Out of the total, the researchers established the names of 409 dead children: 372 in Ukraine and 37 in Russia.
Nearly all cases were checked against two or more independent sources, including reports from relatives, and publications by schools, hospitals, local authorities, law enforcement, and the media. Exceptions were made for hard-to-reach and occupied territories, where the only source was sometimes official reports specifying the exact place and date of a child’s death.
The journalists took into account the territory where a child died, not the child’s citizenship. Deaths that occurred in Crimea, Sevastopol, and the occupied parts of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions were included in the Ukrainian tally.
In Russia, almost half of child deaths occurred in 2026
Of the 67 confirmed child deaths on Russian territory, 32 occurred from January to September 2026 — nearly as many as the 35 confirmed killed in the previous four years of the war combined. For comparison, researchers confirmed eight cases in all of 2025 and 19 in 2024.
Child deaths were recorded in 13 Russian regions, with Belgorod Region at the top of the list with 30 cases, followed by Krasnodar Krai with 14 deaths, the Kursk Region with seven, the Bryansk Region with five, and another three in the Moscow Region.
Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had previously reported 264 children allegedly killed in Ukrainian attacks. However, Meduza was able to match only 99 of these cases to specific events. Of them, 44 occurred in Russia’s internationally recognized territory and were included in the outlet’s count, and another 55 happened in occupied Ukrainian territories. For the remaining cases, Russian authorities did not provide enough information to allow for independent verification.
Ukrainian authorities had reported 755 killed children as of Oct. 9. The differences between the estimates are explained in part by the lack of access to occupied territories and different counting methodologies. In particular, Russian authorities include in their statistics those killed in occupied regions of Ukraine.
The number of child victims continues to grow
In July 2026, the number of children killed and injured in Ukraine reached its highest level since April 2022, according to UN data. Over the month, the organization confirmed the deaths of 17 children and injuries to another 166.
One of the deadliest Russian strikes in terms of child deaths remains the attack on Kryvyi Rih on April 4, 2025, which killed nine children aged three to 17. Russia’s Ministry of Defense claimed the target was a meeting of Ukrainian military personnel and Western instructors, but surveillance camera footage published by France 24 did not confirm the presence of military personnel in the area of the attack.
The researchers separately note that the statistics remain incomplete due to a lack of access to cities captured by Russia. The UN confirmed the deaths of at least 120 children in Mariupol from February to April 2022, but the real number of victims may be significantly higher. For example, it is still unknown how many children died in the Russian strike on the Mariupol Drama Theater on March 16, 2022.
In addition to deaths directly linked to hostilities, Meduza found five more cases of children’s deaths that the researchers did not include in the main count because they did not fit the international criteria for counting war victims. Among them are three murders committed by Russian servicemen who had returned from the front. Two of the perpetrators received life sentences, and another was sentenced to 14 years in a penal colony.
The Insider earlier examined claims by Russian human rights commissioner Yana Lantratova that Ukrainian military personnel supposedly attack playgrounds on a daily basis and deliberately kill Russian children. Even the official statistics of Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not confirm her claim of children dying daily.
