Analysts say 2025 was deadliest year of war for both Ukrainian and Russian civilians

Almost 3,000 Russian and Ukrainian civilians were killed and another 17,775 were injured in fighting between the two countries last year, according to a report published by Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT), an independent Russian military think tank.

In the report, Blood on the Negotiating Table: Civilian Casualties in 2025, which was released earlier this month, CIT analysts said that 2025 had been the deadliest year of the war since it began keeping precise records in 2023.

At least 2,919 civilians, of whom 96 were children, were killed in total, CIT said, adding that among the 17,775 people injured in fighting, there had been 1,000 minors.

Some 2,348 people were killed and another 13,952 were injured in unoccupied areas of Ukraine, while 298 people were killed and 1,751 people were injured in Russian-occupied parts of the country, while 273 died and a further 2,072 were injured in Russia, meaning four out of five civilian deaths occurred in non-Russian occupied areas of Ukraine, CIT observed.

The single most deadly attack in civilian terms occurred when Russian missiles struck two apartment buildings in the western Ukrainian city of Ternopil on 19 November, killing 38 people. The highest number of injuries in a single Russian missile strike was recorded in the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnipro on 24 June, when 319 people were injured and 21 were killed in a single attack.

Outside Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, the most civilians died in the Donetsk (756), Kherson (359) and Kharkiv (279) regions, while in occupied areas, the worst-affected regions were Kherson (144) and Donetsk (82). The highest number of deaths in Russia occurred in the Belgorod (134), Kursk (61) and Bryansk (24) regions, all of which border Ukraine.

Civilians were most frequently killed in drone strikes, which caused 1,376 civilian deaths in 2025 alone, while also injuring 10,089 people, the report concluded.