Russia Has Killed 358 Ukrainian Children, Injured 681 Since War Began

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has resulted in the deaths of more than 300 children, according to Ukrainian authorities.

The ongoing conflict killed 358 children between its start on Feb. 24 and Thursday morning, the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine said in a statement.

Meanwhile, 681 children have been "injured to various degrees of severity" due to the war, according to the agency.

In total, 1,039 children have been affected by Russia's invasion, most of them — around 361 — coming from the partially Russian-occupied Donetsk region of Ukraine.

The remaining were from Kharkiv (194), Kyiv (116), Chernihiv (68), Luhansk (61), Mykolaiv (53), Kherson (52) and Zaporizhzhia (40).

"These numbers are not final, as work is ongoing to establish them in places of active hostilities, in temporarily occupied and liberated territories," the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine said.

The agency's figures lined up with the data provided by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in its most recent Ukrainian civilian casualty report, which said that 346 children had died in Russia's invasion as of Monday.

These children were among the 5,110 civilians who were killed in the war, according to the OHCHR.

A total of 6,752 civilians, including 547 children, were injured as a result of the ongoing conflict.

The U.N. agency believes the actual casualty figures are "considerably higher" due to delays in the receipt of information as well as a backlog of reports that need to be verified.

"Most" of the recorded civilian casualties were "caused by the use of explosive weapons with wide area effects, including shelling from heavy artillery and multiple launch rocket systems, and missile and air strikes," the OHCHR said.

Russian forces have been accused of deliberately striking civilian targets. Their attacks on Ukraine's civilian population have escalated in recent weeks, according to Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council.

"We have a system to monitor and track all airstrikes and other attacks in our country and what we have noticed recently is a tendency to destroy more and more civilian targets. They have decided to terrorize civilian population. That’s not my emotions but what our monitoring is telling us," Danilov was quoted as saying by The Guardian.

Russia has denied or deflected responsibility for the reported attacks on civilians.

Killing, torturing or taking hostage of non-combatants in war is a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Meanwhile, "extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity [and] carried out unlawfully and wantonly," is considered a war crime under Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.