A United Nations representative told the Security Council that overnight between July 30 and July 31 a large-scale Russian missile and drone attack on Kyiv killed at least 31 people, including five children, and injured 1,159 people, according to the representative’s account to the council.

The representative said the strikes damaged “25–27 locations across four districts of the capital,” including a school, a preschool, the pediatric wing of a hospital and a university building, and that an entire section of an apartment block was destroyed, leaving people trapped beneath burning rubble. Humanitarian partners, including United Nations agencies and local non-governmental organizations in Kyiv, provided immediate emergency assistance, the representative said.

The U.N. official said the same night attacks occurred in seven other regions — Vinnytsia, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Zhytomyr, Zaporizhzhia, Cherkasy and Chernihiv — and that at least 120 civilian casualties were reported across the country that night. The representative added that frontline areas saw additional deaths and injuries, including two killed and 10 injured in Donetsk region and one killed and seven injured in Kharkiv region; civilian casualties were also reported in Sumy, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.

The remarks followed a separate series of reported strikes on July 28–29, when the representative said at least 25 people were killed across Ukraine in another wave of air strikes. The representative cited a reported strike on a prison in the Zaporizhzhia region that killed 16 and injured 35, and a reported strike on a hospital in Kamyanske, Dnipropetrovsk region, that killed three people, including a pregnant woman, and injured at least 22 people, including 10 medical workers. The representative also said an attack in the village of Nova Platonivka in Kharkiv region killed six people who were gathered to receive humanitarian aid, and that a drone strike on a civilian bus near Ivoivanske reportedly killed three elderly women and injured 19 passengers.

Citing the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the representative said that from the start of the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 through June 30, OHCHR recorded 13,580 civilian deaths, including 716 children, and 34,115 civilian injuries, including 2,173 children.

The representative also reported civilian casualties inside the Russian Federation in recent days, listing reported deaths and injuries in the Belgorod, Bryansk, Kursk, Leningrad and Rostov regions. The U.N. statement said it is not in a position to independently verify those reports but expressed concern about the increasing impact of reported Ukrainian strikes on civilian populations in the Russian Federation. The representative reiterated that attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure are prohibited under international law and “must stop immediately wherever they occur.”

Turning to detainees, the representative said OHCHR has interviewed nearly 140 male Ukrainian prisoners of war who were recently released, many after up to three years of captivity. “Nearly all” of those interviewed reported torture or ill treatment, including severe beatings, electric shocks, sexual violence, dog attacks, suffocation and mutilation, the representative said, and OHCHR recorded credible allegations of the execution of 106 Ukrainian soldiers captured between late August 2024 and May 2025. The U.N. official urged parties to fulfill obligations under international humanitarian law in their treatment of prisoners and to continue prisoner exchanges.

“The continuing horrendous attacks are simply unacceptable,” the representative told the council, and repeated an “urgent call for an immediate, unconditional and complete ceasefire” to pave the way for a lasting peace in line with the U.N. Charter, international law and relevant U.N. resolutions. The representative added that the United Nations “remains ready to support all meaningful efforts” toward that outcome.

The statement combined reporting on recent strikes, OHCHR casualty compilations and newly documented accounts of mistreatment of detainees; no formal council action or vote on the matter was recorded in the transcript of this briefing.