At least 437 children are among more than 8,300 civilians who have been killed in Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February, the country’s prosecutor general said on Saturday in a grim new accounting of the war’s toll.

Andriy Kostin, Ukraine’s prosecutor-general, said that in addition to the death toll, more than 11,000 civilians had been injured in the conflict. But he added that the true numbers were likely to be far higher, in part because the authorities in the capital, Kyiv, have no access to data in areas in the south and east of the country that Russian forces have occupied.

In a report published on November 14, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said that 408 children were among 6,557 people killed since the invasion began and 750 others were among 10,074 injured, though it, too, said the true figures were “certainly higher”.

Its data showed that March had been the conflict’s deadliest month. Russian missiles fired from artillery positions close to front lines or over a longer range at towns and cities have caused the bulk of civilian casualties. Children were also among the victims of some of the conflict’s worst massacres of civilians, including a missile strike on a railway platform in the city of Kramatorsk in the Donetsk region in April, which killed more than 50 people, and an attack on a civilian convoy in Zaporizhzhia region in September when at least 30people died.

In both cases, the civilians were attempting to flee the fighting. In one of the war’s most poignant casualties, a 4-yearold girl with Down syndrome, Liza Dmytriyeva, died of shrapnel wounds in July after a shopping mall was struck by a missile in the city of Vinnytsia in central Ukraine.

Photos of her pink and black stroller lying in the street were shared across the world. Ukraine’s government has made a strenuous effort to document crimes committed since the Russian invasion began, with a view to mounting prosecutions.

(New York Times News Service)