During the war, more than 1,400 civilians died in Russia. Military attacks will kill an average of 41 people per month in 2026

Military attacks will kill an average of 41 people per month in 2026

Since 2022, at least 1,406 civilians in 27 regions have died due to the war in Russia and occupied Crimea. Of these, 183 people have been since the beginning of 2026: this is 2.4 times more than for the same period a year earlier. Most die from drone attacks. We collected all known cases from open sources and displayed them on a map.

In 2025, an average of 25 civilians per month died from military operations in Russia and Crimea, and in the first 4 months of 2026 - almost twice as many, 41 people. The death toll is growing, as is the number of affected regions - now there are victims in 27 regions, although at the end of 2025 there were only 20. Since then, the Smolensk, Tver, Yaroslavl and Vladimir regions, as well as the republics of Adygea, Bashkortostan and Chuvashia have been added to the regions with civilian casualties.

According to government and media reports, we estimate that during the entire period of the full-scale invasion of Russia and Crimea, at least 1,406 civilians were killed as a result of military operations. Of these, we found 882 dead through news from governors’ and media channels - details about each such case can be found on the map below.

This number is likely an underestimate; there is no guarantee that authorities are reporting all casualties. The remaining 524 people, according to the Russian Human Rights Commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova in January 2026, died in part of the Kursk region, which was occupied by Ukraine from August 2024 to March 2025.

Previously, the publication 7x7 calculated that as of February 23, 2026, 1,198 civilians died in Russia (excluding Crimea). Our estimates are slightly higher - for the same period, in the same territory, we counted 1,255 deaths.

The representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Rodion Miroshnik, claimed in April that more than 8 thousand Russian civilians died - this estimate is far from ours and may be correct, either if governors do not publicly report the majority of the dead, or if residents of the occupied territories after 2022 were also counted.

We downloaded all messages from the telegram channels of the governors, the Conflict Intelligence Team channel, as well as the 7x7 and NeMoskva Speaks media channels (they regularly report on dead Russian civilians), until May 11, 2026. From these, using keywords and using artificial intelligence, we selected messages about dead civilians. We partially automatically removed duplicates - posts that write about the same events in different words. The result was a dataset of 2993 posts, we reviewed all of them manually and identified from them unique messages about dead civilians on Russian territory. We considered that a person died as a result of war if he died from a missile (including air defense), artillery, drone, air bomb, as well as destruction caused by military attacks, or suffered a heart attack upon arriving at the place where he was (there are also such cases). In addition, we counted mine explosions and incidents where a civilian was run over by a tank. We counted both Ukrainian attacks and cases where Russian military shells hit Russia. We did not consider that a person died from hostilities if he got into an accident with the participation of the military, or at the hands of the Russian military not in the context of hostilities (in domestic conflicts). We did not consider members of the military defense and employees of the Russian Guard to be civilians and did not include them in the count, but we did count employees of military enterprises (this division corresponds to the definition of a civilian according to international law). The death toll in Sudja is based on government statements and cannot be directly verified because the consequences of each individual attack during the occupation were not published. However, based on data on the number of missing people, as well as data from the Ukrainian authorities, the estimate of 524 people seems realistic to us. In October last year, according to the Lisa Alert search team, more than 800 Kursk residents remained missing; a year earlier, almost 2,000 people were listed as missing on the official portal of the Kursk region, and the chairman of the Russian Red Cross spoke of an even larger number - 5,600 applications to search for missing people. With so many missing people, claims of more than 500 dead seem realistic. Journalists from the Agency and 7x7 were able to identify the names of 70 victims. Data from the Ukrainian authorities on the number of deaths in Sudzha is available only for January 2025 - then they claimed that 112 people died in the Kursk region during the occupation. At that time, the Russian authorities’ estimate was similar—more than 100 dead. After this, the Ukrainian side did not provide estimates of the number of deaths, and the Russian side's estimates grew over time, as and after the return of control over the territory. If we came across isolated cases in the news about those killed in Sudzha during the occupation (there were several such news), we did not include them in the count, because they could already be taken into account in Tatyana Moskalkova’s statement about 524 dead.

Missile attacks from Ukraine almost stopped after the reduction of international assistance in the spring of 2025, and at the same time Russian troops ousted the Ukrainian Armed Forces from the Kursk region. However, the number of war victims did not stop growing. The reason is that most people are killed by drones, and the number of drone arrivals is increasing almost every month.

The most common scenario for civilian deaths is when a drone hits a residential building or a moving car, in such cases one or two people usually die. But given that there are now dozens of UAV attacks per day, in total this leads to significant casualties - according to our calculations, at least 474 people died from drone strikes people, or 54% of all deaths (not including those killed in Sudzha).

Moreover, 30% of drone victims have died since the beginning of 2026 (143 people) and 48% in 2025. In 2025, 2.4 times more people died from drone attacks than the year before. 33 people died as a result of mine explosions. The rest were victims of other types of weapons (usually artillery or missile strikes), but in some cases the type of weapon was not specified, so some of these people may also have died from drone attacks.

While drone attacks are the most common cause of death, the most notorious and deadly incidents involve missile attacks and airstrikes. The largest in terms of the number of victims (not counting the actions in Sudzha during the occupation) was the shelling of Belgorod on December 30, 2023, which killed 25 people.

The second and third places were taken not by Ukrainian attacks, but by Russian ones. On May 12, 2024, the entrance to an apartment building collapsed in Belgorod, killing 19 people. The Russian Ministry of Defense then stated that a downed Ukrainian missile fell on the house, but CIT experts believe that, based on the nature and direction of the destruction, a more likely explanation is an accidental Russian bomb.

On October 17, 2022, in Yeisk, Krasnodar Territory, a Russian fighter plane crashed onto a residential building. The pilots ejected and survived, but 16 civilians were killed. According toauthorities and experts , it was a training flight - there is a training base for training fighter pilots in Yeysk.

Most of the deaths (658 people) occurred in the Kursk region, most of them died in Sudzha during the Ukrainian occupation. More than a third of the war deaths occurred in the Belgorod region (509 people). Other border regions - Bryansk region and Krasnodar region - are also leaders in the number of victims.

However, the geography of shelling is constantly expanding - in 2026, seven new ones were added to the affected regions. The farthest civilian death from the border with Ukraine is in Udmurtia, 1,300 kilometers from the border, where three people were killed and more than 30 were injured at the Izhevsk Kupol plant last July.