Of that total, 873 children died on internationally recognized Ukrainian territory, including occupied Crimea, Sevastopol and parts of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions. Another 67 died on Russian territory. Meduza stressed that this is a minimum estimate.
For its count in Ukraine, the outlet used data from the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission, which had confirmed the deaths of 835 children as of Aug. 31. Meduza established 38 additional cases up to Oct. 9.
Full names were established for 409 of the dead: 372 in Ukraine and 37 in Russia. Almost all cases were confirmed by two or more sources, including accounts from relatives, school and hospital postings, and reports from law enforcement and local authorities.
The tally was kept by place of death rather than the child's citizenship, because Russia forced people in the occupied territories to obtain Russian documents.
According to Ukrainian authorities, more than half of the children — 450 — died between February and December 2022. Information from the first months of the invasion remains incomplete: the UN confirmed the deaths of at least 120 children in Mariupol between February and April 2022, but the true toll may be significantly higher.
In Russia, almost half of confirmed child deaths occurred in 2026 — 32 cases between January and September. That is almost as many as in the previous four years combined, Meduza noted. By comparison, eight cases were confirmed in all of 2025 and 19 in 2024.
Child deaths were recorded in 13 Russian regions. The highest numbers were in the Belgorod region (30), the Krasnodar region (14), the Kursk region (7), the Bryansk region (5) and the Moscow region (3).
The number of child casualties is rising: in July, the UN confirmed the deaths of 17 children and injuries to another 166 in Ukraine — the highest figure since April 2022. Among the deadliest attacks, the outlet named a strike on Kryvyi Rih on April 4, 2025, which killed nine children aged three to 17, and a strike on Ternopil on Nov. 19 of the same year, which killed at least 38 people, including eight children, and wounded another 99.
Meduza also found three cases of children killed in Russia by military personnel who had returned from the front. They were not included in the main count because they are not directly linked to combat operations.
The figures diverge from the sides' own estimates. The Ukrainian site Children of War reported 755 children killed as of Oct. 9. The Russian Foreign Ministry claimed 264 children killed as of June 30, but Meduza was able to match only 99 cases to specific events, 44 of them on internationally recognized Russian territory and 55 in occupied Ukrainian territories. The outlet also noted that the strike on the Mariupol Drama Theater on March 16, 2022, has still not produced precise data on the number of children killed there.