Bombing into submission: Russian targeting of civilians and infrastructure in Ukraine

The third year of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine saw Russia scale up its aerial campaign against civilians, resulting in a record-high spike in civilian targeting and an increased civilian death toll. But analyzing just direct Russian attacks that led to deaths or injuries reveals only a part of the grim reality for civilians living in Ukraine. This report extends the discussion on the war’s impact on civilians by analyzing over 5,500 events targeting civilian infrastructure, tracked with newly introduced ACLED tags. These data reveal a pattern of indiscriminate strikes on residential houses, medical facilities, educational institutions, and the energy sector across Ukraine. Russia’s attacks on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine inflict increasingly severe hardships on civilians, making Ukraine ever more dependent on external support and complicating ongoing and future recovery efforts.

An intensifying aerial campaign against civilians

Russian remote attacks against civilians in Ukraine

Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians reached an all-time high in 2024, with an over 30% increase in the total number of remote attacks leading to civilian casualties amid Russia’s steamroller offensive. ACLED estimates that over 1,600 civilians have died as a result of these attacks in 2024 — 16% more than in 2023. Unlike in the first two years of the invasion, an ever-growing share of these attacks in 2024 was caused by air and drone strikes, as Russian forces scaled up the use of aerial glide bombs along the border and the frontline, and the use of Shahed-type drones across the rest of the country.¹ In 2024, the number of aerial attacks against civilians more than tripled, of which over a quarter were combined with shelling. The number of remote attacks increased sharply in July at the height of Russia’s attempt to seize the remainder of the Donetsk region and peaked in August and September as Ukraine mounted a counter-offensive into Russia’s own Kursk region (see graph below).

As was the case in 2023, most attacks on civilians occurred in the smaller part of the Kherson region on the right bank of the Dnipro river, which remains under Ukrainian control. The number of these attacks increased by a third in 2024, with drones becoming a weapon of choice. Drones typically send a real-time video feed to their operators, suggesting deliberate targeting of civilians.² Similarly, the number of drone strikes on remaining civilians quadrupled in the Nikopol district of the Dnipropetrovsk region facing the Russian-occupied city of Enerhodar, which hosts the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) across the river. Approximately one in five drone strikes in the Nikopol district resulted in civilian fatalities. As Russia ramped up cross-border strikes with its aerial glide bombs, Kharkiv became the most deadly region for Ukrainian civilians after Donetsk in 2024, while Sumy entered the top four after surpassing Zaporizhia and Dnipropetrovsk. In the fourth quarter of 2024, Russian forces expanded the glide bomb campaign against Zaporizhia city, leading to a sharp increase in civilian casualties there.

Russia’s attacks on civilian infrastructure

The war on housing, education, and health care

Violent incidents targeting infrastructure in Ukraine

The impact of Russia’s war against Ukraine goes beyond the mere deaths and injuries. ACLED data show a persistent pattern of targeting of populated areas during the three years of Russian invasion — often indiscriminate, other times more deliberate. A little under 5,500 events (out of a total of over 140,000 conflict events recorded between February 2022 and December 2024) explicitly list damage to residential properties (over 4,200 events), schools (over 650 events), health care facilities (over 350 events), and energy infrastructure (almost 1,000 events).³ An additional 4,500 events are based on reports that mention damage to civilian infrastructure but provide few details. The extent of destruction is likely greater than reports suggest, especially in settlements that have been turned into battlegrounds and reduced to rubble as a result.⁴ Incomplete information on the damaged infrastructure presents another constraint. 

Over three-quarters of the events that provide details on the four types of civilian infrastructure flag damage to residential buildings (see maps below), ranging from individual houses to dormitories and high-rise apartment blocks, of which over 75% was caused by Russian projectiles. While battles in Ukraine in the past two years have been, to varying degrees, contained to five eastern and southern regions, the fiercely contested Donetsk region tops the list of areas with the most damage to residential properties on both sides of the line of contact. ACLED records damage to residential buildings in 23 and 24 of Ukraine’s 27 regions in 2023 and 2024, respectively, in contrast to 17 in 2022. 

Residential areas in the Sumy and Kharkiv regions bore the brunt of Russian indiscriminate shelling and airstrikes in 2024. Russian retaliation for the Kursk incursion may only partially explain the targeting of Sumy — a relative backwater in the previous two years — as it came under relentless Russian fire not only in August onward but also as early as March. This happened shortly before Russia began to ramp up its aerial campaign against Kharkiv. Kharkiv city and its environs once again became hotspots after a relative lull in 2023 and amid an ongoing aerial duel with Russia’s Belgorod city and region, which may have prompted a Russian attempt to create a buffer zone between the two by reinvading northern Kharkiv region. Large cities in central and southern Ukraine routinely came under attack as well, including the capital Kyiv. There, damage was mostly caused by the falling debris from intercepted Russian missiles and drones as both the number of strikes and projectiles used increased when Russia’s assault on the Donetsk region went into overdrive.

Damage to educational institutions across Ukraine frequently occurs along with damage to other types of civilian infrastructure, primarily residential properties. Coupled with random distribution of impacted sites, such as kindergartens, schools, colleges, and universities, this suggests mostly indiscriminate targeting, though some educational and auxiliary facilities have been used for hosting the military.⁵ Russia’s ballistic missile strikes on a military communications institute on 3 September 2024 in Poltava became the deadliest attack on an educational establishment last year, killing 58 and injuring at least 328 people, most of them soldiers. Nevertheless, daily Russian aerial attacks and shelling have disrupted schooling, with remote classes remaining in place and some schools literally pushed underground.⁶ Parents of children in Russia-occupied areas seeking Ukrainian online schooling run the risk of reprisals in a brutal and severely underreported environment.⁷

In 2024, there were over 100 instances of aerial attacks and shelling on health care facilities ranging from pharmacies to hospitals, often resulting in casualties among health care personnel. On 8 July 2024, a Russian cruise missile destroyed Okhmatdyt, Ukraine’s main hospital for critically ill children in Kyiv city. The strike brought back the grim memory of Russia’s bombing of a maternity ward in the besieged Mariupol in March 2022. While most attacks on health infrastructure seem collateral — the missiles launched at Okhmatdyt appeared to have been meant for a nearby defense plant — health care staff were targeted deliberately in at least some instances. This is demonstrated by Russia’s use of double taps — a practice of repeated targeting of already impacted areas, leading to casualties among rescue teams arriving at the scene, which is proscribed by international humanitarian law.⁸ Some of these repeated strikes were carried out with cluster munitions. Worryingly, Russian drones appeared to be hunting down ambulances on the move or arriving at impact sites — ACLED records over 10 such incidents in 2024, mostly in the part of the Kherson region remaining under Ukrainian control. According to the Attacks on Health Care in Ukraine project, deliberate and collateral attacks on health care resulted in over 250 fatalities among health workers since February 2022, with over a quarter of them recorded last year.⁹

Further evidenced by frequent reports of torture and execution of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians followed by little to no prosecution by the Russian authorities,¹⁰ the Russian government demonstrates disregard toward the laws of war and the culture of impunity during the invasion — a disregard that has also spread to remote attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure. While most infrastructure targeting events appear indiscriminate, the widespread damage across Ukraine points to at least a lack of care on the side of Russian forces in sparing civilian objects when launching attacks. The choice of weapons further supports this hypothesis — the increased use of less accurate but highly destructive¹¹ glide bombs on population centers has devastated civilian infrastructure in the frontline regions. By exacting a high cost of the war on civilians, Russia appears to be attempting to strong-arm Ukraine into surrendering regardless of the developments on the battlefield. Beyond Russia’s strategies, failed military reform, the prevalence of faulty equipment, and insufficient military training in Russia¹² led to occasional mistakes and misfires, including in Russian¹³ and Russian-occupied¹⁴ territories.

The deliberate targeting of energy infrastructure

As in the case of residential, education, and health care infrastructure, damage to Ukraine’s energy infrastructure is often collateral, as exemplified by the routine reports of impacted overhead power and gas lines. Yet, since late 2022, Russia has also been explicitly targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, despite it violating international humanitarian law¹⁵ and international arrest warrants for Russian political and military leadership believed to be involved in ordering the strikes.¹⁶

In contrast to drone-led strikes between October 2022 and March 2023, which primarily targeted power distribution facilities, the campaign in late March 2024 marked a shift toward the destruction of power generation itself.¹⁷ After a lull during the 2023-2024 heating season, strikes on energy infrastructure ramped up between March and August (see graph below), which involved hundreds of missiles and drones primarily focused on destroying thermal power plants across the country. Publicly available information on impacted sites is scarce, but the complete destruction of all three thermal power plants in the Kharkiv region and another plant south of Kyiv city is confirmed. Russia also targeted the Dnipro hydroelectric power plant in Zaporizhia city twice, as well as underground gas storage facilities in western Ukraine (see map below). By September, Ukraine lost 80% of its thermal power generation capacity and about half of its overall power generation capacity.¹⁸

Russian leadership claimed the campaign against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure sought to disrupt domestic defense production and responded to Ukrainian escalating drone strikes on Russia’s oil infrastructure and long-range missile strikes on military facilities deep inside Russia.¹⁹ The strikes induced rolling blackouts across Ukraine during peak consumption in the hot months, affecting the country’s entire population. As rolling blackouts continued into December 2024, the Christmas wave of drone and missile strikes on thermal power plants and boiler stations has also disrupted the heating supply for hundreds of thousands of people in the Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Ivano-Frankivsk regions.²⁰

As Ukraine became increasingly reliant on nuclear power and electricity imports from Europe, the strikes in August, November, and December targeted the grids distributing power from the three nuclear power plants in central and western Ukraine, inducing an emergency reduction of output and threatening nuclear safety. Although in a cold shutdown, the ZNPP, which Russian forces seized in the early days of their invasion in 2022, was a target of nearly a dozen attacks in 2024, which Russian occupation authorities blamed on Ukrainian forces. One of them, on 11 August, caused a fire at one of the two cooling towers, rendering it irreparable.²¹

Targeted Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure have led to emergency blackouts for over 1 million people²² in addition to planned rolling blackouts introduced across Ukraine that have affected over three-quarters of companies.²³ In large cities such as Kyiv, where residents spent almost 100 days of 2024 without electricity,²⁴ power cuts can disrupt the centralized systems of heating and water supply, in addition to disabling elevators in high-rise buildings and overloading cellular networks.²⁵ Meanwhile, the whole country is experiencing increasing air raid alerts²⁶ that close down educational facilities, government buildings, and many private businesses,²⁷ further affecting people’s lives.

The pattern of Russian targeting of civilian and energy infrastructure will have major implications for the recovery efforts in Ukraine. Outlined as one of the European Union priorities for Ukraine, reconstruction efforts are already ongoing to ensure the functioning of essential services, though limited and heavily impeded by the continuing Russian attacks.²⁸ Estimated to cost hundreds of billions of US dollars and growing,²⁹ continued reconstruction efforts and eventual complete recovery will have to see Ukraine’s partners overcome fatigue and aid skepticism amid ravaging Russian offensives, indiscriminate strikes on populated areas, and deliberate destructive campaigns.

Visuals produced by Ana Marco.