For four and a half years, as President Vladimir V. Putin tried to isolate Russian society from his war against Ukraine, civilian deaths on the Russian side were largely confined to border regions of Russia or occupied areas of Ukraine.
Now, that is rapidly changing, as Ukraine uses a growing arsenal of cheap drones and missiles to take the war to Russia. With Ukraine conducting near-constant assaults even in areas far from the front, Russian civilians are dying in long-range attacks at the highest rate since the war began, according to the Conflict Intelligence Team, an independent group that tracks casualties.
The latest example came on Monday, when the Russian authorities reported that at least 13 people had died in a Ukrainian attack on an oil refinery in Nizhnekamsk, an industrial city in the Tatarstan region about 550 miles east of Moscow. It was one of the deadliest air assaults on Russian territory since the full-scale war began in February 2022.
In the first seven months of this year, 327 people died in Russia from shelling, drone attacks and airstrikes outside occupied areas, according to data compiled by the Conflict Intelligence Team. That toll far exceeds the 145 civilian deaths that the group recorded for the same period last year.
The organization found that 2,366 people were wounded in such attacks over that period this year, more than double last year’s figure.
Ukraine says that its stepped-up air war on sites like oil refineries and online-retail warehouses is an attempt to pressure Mr. Putin to end the war. Kyiv says it does not target civilians, and maintaining this argument is critical to preserving international support. But some attacks have clearly gone awry or caused deaths as a byproduct.
The higher tempo of Ukrainian strikes has contributed to the steepest decline in Mr. Putin’s public approval ratings since the start of the invasion and fueled discontent among Russians who are exasperated by years of war. But it is far from clear that the growing Russian civilian deaths will change Mr. Putin’s calculus about ending the conflict.
Though more Russians are dying across the country as a result of the Ukrainian strikes, no one has died within Moscow’s city limits. Mr. Putin has urged Russians to resist the psychological intimidation of the strikes, which he has said are aimed at trying to get Russians to lose their resolve.
Facing a relative stalemate on the front lines, Russia and Ukraine are bombarding each other with increasingly large strikes away from the battlefield in an aerial conflict that is heightening danger for civilians on both sides.
Far more Ukrainian civilians have died in the war than Russian civilians. In recent months, Ukrainian civilians have been dying in ever-higher numbers because of Moscow’s record use of menacing ballistic missiles and large-scale drone strikes.
Ukraine is struggling to defend against these missiles because of a shortage of American-made interceptors. Kyiv does not have ballistic missiles of its own but says it is close to deploying them.
In the first seven months of this year, 1,695 civilians died in the parts of Ukraine that are not controlled by Russia, and another 12,515 suffered injuries, according to the Conflict Intelligence Team data.
Nearly 70 percent of the war’s civilian deaths from aerial attacks this year have taken place in territory controlled by Ukraine, the organization found.
The United Nations says that more than 16,000 civilians have died in Ukraine since the war began in 2022, including in the Russian-occupied areas. Those statistics are almost certainly a significant undercount because the organization does not count cases it cannot confirm and lacks full access to Russian-occupied territories. They do not fully account for deaths in occupied cities like Mariupol, for example, where Human Rights Watch estimated, using satellite imagery of burial grounds, that more than 8,000 people died during the 2022 siege of the city.
Estimates suggest that about half a million Russian and Ukrainian soldiers have died over the course of the war, with losses far heavier on the Russian side.
Russia has long claimed that it does not attack civilian targets. But Russian ballistic missiles have been striking Ukrainian apartment buildings for years, often with devastating effects and no clear military target nearby. After Ukraine blew up an oil refinery in Moscow, Russia responded early last month with a huge attack on Kyiv that left 31 people dead.
In Russia, the increased civilian deaths are primarily the result of what President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has nicknamed “long-range sanctions” aimed at disrupting the economic and logistical engines of the Russian war machine.
Some Ukrainian strikes, however, have hit purely civilian sites. In June, a 6-month-old baby was killed when a drone exploded and set a house on fire in Yegoryevsk, about 70 miles southeast of Moscow, the authorities said.
This month, a drone plunged onto a crowded beach in southern Russia and blew up, leaving seven people dead, including three children. The seaside village in the Krasnodar region where the drone exploded is home to the compressor station that begins the natural gas pipeline connecting Russia with Turkey under the Black Sea, leading to questions about whether that was the intended target.
It is also possible that Russian civilians died at a higher rate, albeit not from long-range strikes, when Ukraine invaded and occupied a swath of Russia’s western Kursk region for about seven months in 2024 and 2025.
The Russian authorities said this month that 640 civilians died in the Kursk region during the incursion and occupation, but there have been discrepancies in numbers offered by the Russian authorities about the toll of that incursion, and limited specifics.
The Conflict Intelligence Team data does not include ground assaults, limiting its statistics to drone attacks, airstrikes and shelling incidents with sufficient detail to be considered verified.
Alina Lobzina contributed reporting.
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