All events · Borders by Force Again

Russia's Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine

2022–ongoing · Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus

Displacement Territory Seized Sexual Violence Abduction (Children) Ongoing

Displaced

9.6 million

about 9.6 million people displaced as of early 2026, comprising roughly 5.9 million refugees abroad (mostly in Europe) and about 3.7 million internally displaced within Ukraine (UNHCR)

Share of the population affected

23%

of the population of Ukraine on 1 January 2022, excluding Crimea and Sevastopol, 2022

Killed

300,000–600,000

conflict deaths incl. combatants

Territory

113,000 km²

Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, including Crimea and parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts, together roughly 18-19% of Ukraine's internationally recognized territory as of 2026

As of 2025-09. UNHCR's Global Appeal 2026 records 5.75 million refugees from Ukraine worldwide and 3.75 million internally displaced as of September 2025, and the totals move with each phase of the fighting.

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What happened

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the largest conventional war in Europe since 1945, and has occupied significant portions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts in addition to Crimea. In September 2022, Russia declared the annexation of four partially occupied oblasts, a move the UN General Assembly (Resolution ES-11/4) declared to have no validity under international law. As of early 2026, an estimated 5.9 million Ukrainians remain refugees abroad and about 3.7 million are internally displaced; the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants in March 2023 for President Vladimir Putin and Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova over the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia, with Ukraine estimating thousands of children affected.

Parties

Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, occupying large areas of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts and purporting to annex them in September 2022

Disputed

Russia denies wrongdoing regarding child transfers, describing them as evacuations for children's safety and welfare; Ukraine, the ICC and many governments characterize them as unlawful deportations amounting to a war crime; the ICJ has separate pending proceedings on genocide allegations Ukraine brought against Russia, and the scale of both battlefield casualties and total displacement is estimated variously by different sources.

The denominator

The State Statistics Service of Ukraine estimated 41,167,336 residents at the start of 2022 for the territory excluding Crimea and Sevastopol; UN estimates for the internationally recognised territory including Crimea are close to 43.8 million. No census has been held since 2001, so all figures are projections.

The figure sums refugees recorded abroad and people internally displaced inside Ukraine at a point in time; millions have returned at least temporarily and some have been displaced repeatedly, so it is not a count of distinct people permanently uprooted.

Where the baseline comes from

Demographics of Ukraine — Wikipediaopen-edited
UNHCR Global Appeal 2026 — Ukraine situation overviewofficial

On the death toll

No agreed total exists and both governments treat their own losses as classified. The low end is a documented floor: Mediazona and the BBC Russian Service had confirmed 236,000 named Russian military dead by 31 July 2026 (an acknowledged undercount), Ukraine's President Zelensky has publicly given a figure of about 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed, and OHCHR had verified 15,578 Ukrainian civilians killed as of the figure cited by Russia Matters in mid-2026. The high end reflects Western intelligence and CSIS estimates of Russian military casualties around 1,000,000 killed and wounded and Ukrainian casualties of 250,000-600,000, which imply combined deaths in the high hundreds of thousands. Russia disputes OHCHR's civilian figures and counters with its own claim of 8,012 civilians killed by Ukrainian action; Ukraine's official military-loss figures are widely regarded by Western analysts as understated.

Documented forms of violence

Sexual ViolenceTortureEnforced DisappearanceAbduction of ChildrenArbitrary DetentionDestruction of Property

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine documented torture used 'in a widespread and systematic way in various types of detention facilities', rape and other sexual violence, indiscriminate attacks with explosive weapons destroying civilian housing (2023), and the deportation and forcible transfer of children together with enforced disappearances (2026); the ICC's warrants cover the same child transfers and attacks on civilian objects.

Formal findings

International Criminal Court, Pre-Trial Chamber II (2023) — Issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova (17 March 2023) for the war crimes of unlawful deportation and transfer of children from occupied Ukraine to Russia, and for Kobylash and Sokolov (5 March 2024) and Shoigu and Gerasimov (24 June 2024) for war crimes of attacking civilian objects and the crime against humanity of inhumane acts — source
UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine (2026) — Concluded that the deportation and forcible transfer of Ukrainian children by Russian authorities, and their enforced disappearance, amount to crimes against humanity; verified 1,205 individual cases, about 80% of whom have not been returned — source
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (2023) — Resolved that the forcible transfer and 'russification' of Ukrainian children shows evidence of genocide, and called on member parliaments to recognise it as such; Russia rejects the finding, and the ICC has charged the same conduct as war crimes rather than genocide — source