The mission verified at least 274 civilian deaths and 1,763 injuries during the month, the highest monthly casualty toll recorded in the past four years.
Russian independent media outlet Mediazona, in collaboration with the BBC Russian service, has confirmed the identities of 225,019 Russian military personnel killed in Ukraine.
Bu Ri lost a leg to a mine in Myanmar decades ago. More recently, six other members of his family have suffered a similar fate or worse, in a sign of the devastation wreaked by civil war.
At least 200 Russian soldiers aged 18 have been confirmed killed in Ukraine, according to a new joint investigation by BBC Russian and independent Russian outlet Mediazona, which has identified 226,055 Russian military deaths since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been defined by exceptionally high and sustained casualty rates across all phases of the war, driven by large-scale frontal assaults, prolonged artillery duels, and the expanding use of drone warfare that has widened the lethal “kill zone” across much of the frontline.
At least 200 confirmed 18-year-old soldiers among Russia’s war dead
The youngest confirmed casualty in the latest update was born in 2008, marking the first recorded 18-year-old in the dataset. Researchers say the overall figure includes more than 200 teenagers aged 18, underscoring the scale of young recruits being sent into combat.
One case highlighted in the report is that of 18-year-old Alisher Svirin, who died on 1 May 2026 and was buried later that month in Moscow Oblast. He had signed a contract and served in a motor rifle brigade as a machine gunner. According to the investigation, he could not have spent more than a few months in service before being killed.
Regional patterns show disproportionate burden in poorer Russian republics
Regional data also highlights a consistent imbalance in casualty distribution, with poorer regions such as Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, and Tuva showing significantly higher per-capita losses than Russia’s largest cities.
Researchers attribute this gap to recruitment patterns that rely more heavily on economically disadvantaged areas, where military service offers relatively higher financial incentives.
At the same time, major urban centres such as Moscow remain underrepresented in the casualty lists, reflecting both demographic differences in recruitment and uneven exposure to frontline deployments.
Open-source records show limits of confirmed casualty tracking
The database is compiled from publicly available sources, including obituaries, official regional announcements, social media posts, and burial records. Analysts say it likely captures only a portion of total losses.
The report notes that more than half of confirmed deaths now come from volunteers, mobilised personnel, and convicts recruited from penal colonies, reflecting Russia’s reliance on short-training pipeline forces for frontline deployments.
Battlefield drone warfare is reshaping how deaths are recorded and counted
Researchers also say the structure of the battlefield has changed the visibility of losses. Widespread drone warfare has expanded the “kill zone” across large sections of the front, making recovery of bodies difficult and delaying official confirmation of deaths, sometimes for months or years.
Based on current estimates, analysts suggest Russia’s real death toll could be significantly higher than identified figures, potentially reaching between 347,000 and 502,000 when accounting for incomplete data coverage.
When a Ukrainian strike hit Russian-occupied Starobilsk on May 22, Moscow seized on the attack almost instantly, with Russian officials claiming that 21 students of a local vocational college were killed and dozens more injured and portraying the strike as a deliberate attack on civilians — which Ukraine denied.
The Air Force said Russia launched 207 drones, 181 of which were intercepted. At least 21 drones struck 14 locations, while falling debris was recorded at 13 sites.
Ten Russian soldiers from a single regiment are accused of hunting civilians in Kherson with attack drones, and now face war-crimes charges filed in absentia, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) reported. Investigators say the operators tracked people through the streets and struck ambulances and rescue crews. The 10 are among those participating in a Russian long-lasting terror campaign against Khersoners known as a "human safari."
Kherson lies on the Dnipro River's west bank, with Russian-occupied land directly opposite, and the invading force has made it among the deadliest places to live in Ukraine by deliberately hunting civilians across the city for years.
The drone hunters of one regiment
Counterintelligence officers built a case against 10 drone operators from the 404th Motorized Rifle Regiment, a territorial-defense unit in Russia's "Dnepr" Group of Forces, the SBU reported. The investigation found that the men tracked residents as they moved along Kherson's streets and launched drones at them. The drones carried shaped-charge and high-explosive fragmentation munitions.
Kherson city (Russian-occupied area in red). Map: Deep State
Residents and rights monitors call this campaign a "human safari," the hunting of people going about their ordinary days.
Kherson: human safari rages.
A Russian fiber optic FPV drone chases a car in a residential area; after civilians cut the cable, the drone falls, catches fire.
The documented episodes include attacks on civilian cars and residential blocks, the SBU said. Operators dropped explosives on ambulances at a city hospital. They also carried out a "double" strike on State Emergency Service (DSNS) rescuers who were clearing the aftermath of an earlier Russian shelling.
UN investigators have described this Russian method in Kherson: a first strike, then a second aimed at the people who come to help. Victims suffered shrapnel wounds, burns, and concussions, and civilian infrastructure took significant damage.
Russian soldiers attacked an ambulance in Kherson with a drone.
Based on the evidence, SBU investigators notified all 10 of suspicion under Article 438 of Ukraine's criminal code, which covers war crimes. The notices were issued in absentia. SBU officers in Kherson Oblast led the investigation with the 79th Border Detachment of the State Border Guard Service (DPSU), under the oblast prosecutor's guidance. The agency said efforts to hold the operators accountable continue.
The case fits a wider pattern Ukrainian prosecutors have documented across the oblast in thousands of proceedings.
Russia's overnight drone and missile barrage on 9 June killed and wounded civilians in the Kharkiv Oblast cities of Chuhuiv and Kharkiv, regional officials reported. More strikes over the past 24 hours left several people dead and dozens wounded elsewhere in Ukraine. Ukraine's Air Force said air defense stopped most of the drones, though missiles and others still reached homes.
Russia has pounded Ukrainian cities with nightly aerial barrages since 2022, sending waves of drones and missiles that air defenses can thin but not fully stop. Such daily attacks mainly target residential areas and civilian infrastructure.
Chuhuiv and Kharkiv bear the brunt
A series of Russian missile strikes on Chuhuiv overnight on 9 June killed at least three people and wounded six, the city's mayor, Halyna Minaieva, reported. Fire crews stayed at the impact sites as emergency services worked, she wrote, and the strikes damaged about eight apartment buildings and more than ten detached houses.
Police officers film the aftermath of a Russian strike in Kharkiv Oblast, 9 June 2026. Photo: National Police of Ukraine
In Kharkiv—the regional capital—Russian drone strikes set off fires, damaged at least 18 cars, and blew out windows and facades in residential high-rises, Kharkiv Oblast head Oleh Syniehubov reported.
Police officers film the aftermath of a Russian strike in Kharkiv Oblast, 9 June 2026. Photo: National Police of Ukraine
He said 15 people were hurt, among them three children, including a one-year-old boy, and three women were hospitalized.
A multi-story residential building wrecked by a Russian strike in Kharkiv Oblast, 9 June 2026. Photo: National Police of Ukraine
Both cities sit dozens of kilometers from the Russian border and have been struck repeatedly through the war.
A barrage of two missiles and 166 drones
Russia launched two Kh-59/69 guided air missiles from Voronezh Oblast and 166 strike drones overnight, Ukraine's Air Force reported. The drones included Shahed types, some jet-powered, along with Gerbera, Italmas, "Banderol" loitering munitions, and "Parodiya" decoys, launched from Oryol, Kursk, Bryansk, Primorsko-Akhtarsk, and Millerovo in Russia, occupied Donetsk, and Hvardiiske in occupied Crimea.
By 08:00, air defense had downed or suppressed 146 of the drones. Two missiles and 17 drones struck 18 locations, and debris from intercepted drones fell at eight more.
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Zaporizhzhia counts the damage from the day before
A Russian drone attack the previous day damaged 11 residential buildings across three districts of Zaporizhzhia, the city council reported. Six apartment blocks and five detached houses in the Khortytskyi, Zavodskyi, and Kosmichnyi districts lost windows, balconies, doors, and roofs to blast waves and debris. No one was hurt, and priority repairs were finished.
A nationwide wave
Russian attacks over 8 June killed two people in Sumy Oblast and wounded 13 across 21 hromadas, the regional police reported. A 78-year-old woman died in the Konotop hromada and a 71-year-old man in Seredyna-Buda, with a two-year-old boy and an eight-year-old boy among the injured.
In Donetsk Oblast, Russian forces killed two residents, in Bilozerske and Druzhkivka, and wounded 11 more, nine of them in Sloviansk, Oblast head Vadym Filashkin reported. Police recorded 1,309 attacks on the oblast's front line and residential areas, damaging 53 civilian sites. Hours later, Russia dropped three FAB-250 glide bombs on Sloviansk's outskirts, destroying one home and damaging more than 20.
In Kherson Oblast, drone and artillery attacks killed one person and wounded 13, including a child, Oblast head Oleksandr Prokudin reported.
Drone strikes in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast wounded three people.
Russian forces also hit 12 villages in four border hromadas of Chernihiv Oblast, the local border detachment told Suspilne.
The Russians also attacked communities in Mykolaiv Oblast with drones, where the administration reported no casualties.
Commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, Robert “Madyar” Brovdi, says Russian losses reached 1,006 killed and 1,090 wounded during the first six days of June, as Ukrainian drone forces continued strikes against targets on and beyond the front line.
The commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces published the figures on 7 June alongside an update on overnight operations targeting Russian logistics and infrastructure in occupied territory and inside Russia.
More than 2,000 casualties reported in six days
Brovdi said Russian forces suffered a combined 2,096 killed and wounded between 1 and 6 June.
He described the losses as equivalent to the combat strength of a full Russian assault brigade lost within a single week.
The commander also used a railway comparison to illustrate the scale of the casualties, saying the losses would add the equivalent of 20 refrigerated and medical railcars to Russia’s “one-way ticket” train over the six-day period.
Drone strikes target rear-area infrastructure
According to Brovdi, Ukrainian forces also struck 26 targets overnight on 7 June across occupied parts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Crimea, as well as Russia’s Bryansk Oblast.
He said Ukrainian units destroyed an air defense system and damaged three locomotives, two railway fuel tanks, four electrical substations, and six telecommunications towers. The strikes also disrupted the movement of military cargo toward the front, according to the statement.
Earlier on 7 June, Ukrainian Special Operations Forces reported strikes on the Semikolodezyanska oil depot in Yedi-Quyu and a maritime fuel terminal in Feodosia. Ukrainian officials said the operation was intended to reduce Russia’s logistical and economic capacity to sustain military operations in occupied territory.
The reported targets fit a broader Ukrainian effort to degrade Russian logistics networks, transport infrastructure, and support systems operating behind the frontline.
Ukraine says it doubled the number of successful strikes on Russian targets more than 50 kilometers behind the front line in May under the “Logistics Lockdown” program, which prioritizes attacks on transport networks, fuel infrastructure, depots, and other systems supporting Russian military operations.
A Russian FPV drone strike near a residential building in Kramatorsk on the morning of 6 June killed a man born in 1976, the Kramatorsk City Council reports. These types of drones are operated in real time, so the Russian pilot saw the target before launching the weapon at the person.
The strike fits a documented pattern of Russian FPV-drone targeting of Ukrainian civilians in frontline cities that the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine formally classified as crimes against humanity in May 2025 in its findings on Kherson Oblast, and that Ukrainian authorities continue to document across other frontline regions, including Donetsk Oblast.
Ukraine has documented more than 11,000 Russian FPV attacks on civilians, including "double-tap" strikes that hit the same site after medics and firefighters arrive at an initial attack.
Terrorism: no justification
"Each such crime will be documented, and the guilty parties will sooner or later answer for what they have done. No justification can explain the murder of civilians. This is not how military forces act — this is how terrorists act, for whom human life has no value," the Ukrainian authorities said.
UN findings: from Kherson to three-oblast pattern
In May 2025, the OHCHR-supported UN Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine concluded that Russian drone attacks against civilians in Kherson Oblast were "widespread, systematic, and conducted as part of a coordinated state policy" and constitute crimes against humanity of murder, as well as war crimes.
The Commission documented Russian targeting across more than 100 kilometers of the right bank of the Dnipro River, basing its findings on more than 300 videos, 600 Telegram posts, and 91 interviews with victims, witnesses, and local officials.
In its October 2025 follow-up report to the UN General Assembly, the Commission found that the same pattern had expanded across more than 300 kilometers covering Dnipropetrovsk, Kherson, and Mykolaiv Oblasts. Russian FPV operators have systematically pursued specific civilians along defined routes, including at bus stops, supermarket entrances, pension queues, and residential courtyards.
The Kramatorsk frontline context
Kramatorsk has been a focus of Russian targeting throughout the war, with repeated strikes including double-tap drone attacks on civilian infrastructure and first responders. The city's location near the contact line in Donetsk Oblast places it within FPV drone range.
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