Senior UN officials raised the alarm over escalating Russian drone and missile attacks and their growing impact on civilians, calling for a full, immediate and unconditional ceasefire in line with the UN Charter.The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission reported that July was the deadliest month for civilians in over four years, with at least 437 people killed and more than 2,600 injured. In the first half of this year, civilian casualties rose by 37 percent compared with the same period last year. In August, Kyiv and many other cities suffered dozens of overnight ballistic attacks, resulting in destruction and damage to warehouses storing food supplies, trade centres, residential buildings and other civilian infrastructure.The rise of dronesUnder-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher, who spent last week in Ukraine, recalled witnessing how drone warfare is “dismantling civilian life,” with a 60 percent increase in first-person-view drone attacks in 2026. He described Kherson as a dystopian landscape of kill zones and kamikaze drones, with roads and buildings draped in anti-drone netting. The simplest tasks for people who still live there, such as buying groceries and taking the dog for a walk, have become a race against death.“I met a man recovering from an FPV attack while he was selling fruit; another man had lost both limbs, requiring three operations and 17 blood transfusions,” Fletcher explained.At a hospital near the front line, 70 percent of civilian patients were being treated for blast injuries, predominantly caused by such drones. Civilians live under the constant threat of drone attacks. Nobody is spared. People monitor alerts and alter their movements, but in such proximity to the front line, there is often only a minute, at best, to reach shelter. The impact of the war continues to expandFour and a half years after the Russian Federation launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the civilian toll continues to rise, Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs Rosemary DiCarlo told the Security Council.Millions of Ukrainians continue to endure constant violence, disruption to their daily lives and the inability to return home. But the impact of the war continues to extend beyond Ukrainians and Ukraine’s borders. “The impacts of the war continue to be felt in the broader region. Incidents of airspace incursions in neighbouring countries are becoming more frequent. Recently, Latvia, Moldova and Romania were affected. I also want to express our deep concern at the continuing widespread attacks in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov,” Rosemary DiCarlo underlined.On the 35th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence, she reaffirmed full solidarity with the people of Ukraine, as well as the UN’s continued support and unwavering commitment to and respect for the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognised borders.Calling the continuing cycle of death and escalation “intolerable”, she urged every diplomatic effort to achieve a full, immediate and unconditional ceasefire, leading to a just, lasting and comprehensive peace consistent with international law and the United Nations Charter.Protection of international humanitarian law is a mustHumanitarian workers are also increasingly at risk. Ten aid workers were killed and almost 40 injured between January and July, while at least 20 warehouses were destroyed. Despite the dangers, humanitarians reached more than 3 million people during the first half of 2026. Tom Fletcher urged the Council to defend international humanitarian law, protect humanitarian operations and prepare for a difficult winter. He also called for support for preparations for the tough winter ahead. If energy infrastructure continues to be targeted, people could face another winter without reliable access to essential services such as heating, water and electricity.“We cannot accept a future where civilians are simply expected to become better at surviving the ways war harms them. The people I met in Ukraine do not need more tributes to their resilience. They need protection. They need relief. And above all, they need this war to end.”

As of 1 August 2026, more than 202,900 tonnes had accumulated there – approximately as much material as would be contained in twenty multi-storey buildings.Just a year ago, Ivanna Nazarenko was not working in waste management. Today, she looks at those stockpiles and sees not only the aftermath of war, but also a source of raw materials.Ivanna heads the Development Project Management, Communications and International Cooperation Department at the Municipal Enterprise “Municipal Waste Management Company” of the Kharkiv City Council. The approach that changed the way she sees them is called Urban Mining. The city’s only designated siteAccording to Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov, Kharkiv has suffered the greatest level of destruction among Ukraine’s major cities. In July 2026, he reported that around 13,000 properties in the city had been damaged, including approximately 10,000 residential buildings. Around 4,000 buildings, he added, have already been restored. Shelling continues and the volume of debris from destruction grows every month.The complex operated by Ivanna’s enterprise is the only site in Kharkiv officially designated by the city authorities to receive and process such debris. Everything left behind after strikes is brought here.“More than 200,000 tonnes is not just a figure. It is an enormous challenge, but one that has also opened up opportunities,” Ivanna says. “We started asking ourselves: how can we make sure that this waste does not simply accumulate, but becomes a valuable resource that can contribute to the city’s recovery without harming the environment?” Seeing a resource where people once saw rubbishIvanna began looking for an answer through the UNIDO pilot initiative on urban mining, implemented from July 2025 to July 2026 under the project “Green industrial recovery through municipality-based development in Ukraine.” The initiative covered 50 territorial communities across the Sumy, Chernihiv and Kharkiv oblasts, with one central objective: to change the way debris from destruction is perceived – from rubbish to a resource for recovery.The approach itself is based on a simple idea: materials already embedded in the urban environment – in buildings, infrastructure and surfaces – can, after proper sorting and processing, return to the economic cycle instead of becoming waste. In this logic, a city is not a landfill, but an urban mine.“At first, this was an entirely new field for me,” Ivanna recalls. “But the deeper I became involved in the training, the more I learned about international and national experience and saw how these approaches work in other municipalities, the more I understood that this was not simply an interesting concept, but a practical tool for the recovery of Ukrainian cities.”Heidelberg, Stuttgart, BorodiankaThe initiative went beyond webinars. Ivanna went through a selection process and became one of five representatives of territorial communities from the Sumy, Chernihiv and Kharkiv oblasts to take part in a study visit to Germany.In November 2025, they worked in Heidelberg, Göppingen and Stuttgart. They saw how former military housing areas and industrial zones are transformed into new residential neighbourhoods based on circularity principles. How buildings receive “material passports” describing what they are made of and what can be recovered when they are dismantled and how crushers and sorting lines operate.What impressed Ivanna most was not any single solution, but the way all the elements formed one chain – from dismantling and sorting to processing and returning materials to construction. Urban Mining stopped being an abstract concept and became a sequence of operations that could be seen first-hand.In February 2026, Ivanna and her colleagues travelled to Borodianka in the Kyiv Oblast, to see how similar approaches work in Ukrainian conditions – within Ukrainian legislation and budgets and against the backdrop of reconstruction following destruction.“We met people who had already implemented similar solutions, studied real cases, spoke with experts and built partnerships,” Ivanna says. “Many of these contacts continue today and have already developed into professional cooperation that helps advance urban mining in Kharkiv.” Nine thousand tonnesAt the site, materials are first sorted, with metal, wood and plastic removed. The mineral fraction is then crushed. Roughly half of the resulting material is crushed concrete, while around 15 per cent is metal.As of 1 August 2026, the enterprise had processed more than 9,100 tonnes. Another approximately 193,800 tonnes were still awaiting processing. At the current capacity of around 3,780 tonnes per month, processing this volume would require more than four years of continuous operation.The first secondary materials are already being put to use in access roads and landscaping. The next task is to enable their use in construction.To move towards that goal, the enterprise approached laboratories at Ukrainian universities and worked with them to test how screenings – the fine fraction remaining after crushing – perform in new construction materials. This was done largely with the resources already available: bare-minimum facilities, the enterprise’s own equipment and a team willing to experiment.At the same time, Kharkiv has developed a vision for managing not only debris from destruction, but also construction and demolition waste, supported by a roadmap and a clear framework for cooperation among all relevant stakeholders.What is holding progress backDespite the first results, scaling up recycling is constrained by issues that the enterprise cannot resolve on its own. Ukraine still lacks technical regulations and standards for secondary raw materials, while certification remains unregulated. In practice, material can be crushed, but officially confirming its suitability for construction remains difficult. Removing material from a damaged property also requires the owner’s consent, while there are currently few incentives for using secondary materials in construction.The war itself presents another challenge. Air-raid alerts and the risk of repeated shellings make it difficult to sort materials directly at demolition sites. Some of the machinery also has to be regularly redirected to clear rubble after new attacks on Kharkiv – the very rubble that will later arrive at the processing site. How the idea entered the city’s plansOne of the results of the initiative was an urban mining action plan for Kharkiv, setting out concrete steps for processing and reusing debris from destruction. Five such plans were developed in total for communities across the three regions.The work did not remain confined to the action plan. In March 2026, urban mining was incorporated into the draft Development Strategy of the Kharkiv City Territorial Community – the document through which the city plans its future. The Strategy is still being prepared and is expected to be adopted in 2027. The topic has also been reflected in the community’s strategic environmental assessment, while the next step is its inclusion in the local waste management plan.For Ivanna, this is the most significant result: a concept she first encountered only a year ago has become part of the way the city plans its recovery.Meanwhile, the team is holding discussions with European companies on technologies and potential joint projects. Looking aheadIvanna believes that the potential of the approach extends far beyond dealing with the consequences of the war.“Urban Mining is not only about debris from destruction. In the future, this approach should also cover unsafe and ageing housing stock. This would help conserve natural resources, reuse materials and build a modern circular economy model that will become an important part of the recovery of our cities after the war.”This perspective changes the very meaning of reconstruction. It is not simply about replacing what has been destroyed with something new. It is about preserving the value of materials already present in the city, reducing the extraction of primary raw materials and easing pressure on the environment. “Participating in this project became more than just a new professional experience. It changed the way I see how even the greatest challenges can be turned into opportunities for development when there is a team of like-minded people, a willingness to learn and a determination to implement new solutions.”At the Kharkiv site, 193,800 tonnes still remain. But they are no longer seen only as the aftermath of destruction – they are materials in which the city is learning to recognize a resource of its own.BackgroundThe pilot initiative “Urban Mining for Sustainable Recovery: Capacity Building across Sumy, Chernihiv and Kharkiv Regions” ran from July 2025 to July 2026 and covered 50 communities. Five municipal urban mining action plans were developed under the initiative – for Popivka and Hlukhiv in the Sumy Oblast, Pryluky in the Chernihiv Oblast and Merefa and Kharkiv in the Kharkiv Oblast.Under the project, 34 potential pilot initiatives were identified and developed as green solutions at the municipal level. Seven were selected for implementation, including the urban mining initiative. Together, these seven pilot interventions implemented under the project “Green industrial recovery through municipality-based development in Ukraine,” address a broad range of municipal recovery priorities, including energy-efficient planning, circular economy solutions for industrial waste, urban mining, wastewater treatment, integrated water and energy management, inter-municipal biogas and renewable energy, and sustainable water management.The project forms part of the UNIDO green industrial recovery programme for Ukraine (2024-2028) and is implemented by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), with financial support from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and in partnership with the Ministry of Economy and Environment of Ukraine.

World Food Programme (WFP) drivers describe what it takes to keep humanitarian convoys running along Ukraine's 1,200km frontline, where strikes on humanitarian vehicles have risen sharply over the last year.The mission started like any other. Driver Vasyl was behind the wheel of a World Food Programme (WFP) truck – part of a humanitarian convoy heading to Bilozerka, a small town in southern Ukraine’s Kherson region, roughly 10 kilometres from the frontline of a war now in its fifth year.The four-truck convoy carried humanitarian assistance including medicine, hygiene and shelter items for the 1,400 residents remaining in the town - formerly home to 9,000. As the line of vehicles neared the entrance of Bilozerka, a small bomb-laden drone detonated on the road. Then another drone struck even closer. "We jumped into the armoured car and quickly drove away," Vasyl recounts (last names in this story are being withheld protectively). As they escaped, they heard his truck getting hit multiple times. By the time it was safe to go back, the vehicle was completely engulfed in flames.The drones hit the cab where Vasyl had been sitting minutes earlier. "If I had been inside, I don't think I would have survived," he says.No one in the convoy was hurt. But the humanitarian supplies they carried with them had all gone up in smoke.Such accounts are increasingly common for Vasyl and other humanitarian drivers in Ukraine. They are on the road every day to bring food and other lifesaving assistance to communities living closest to the frontline – where shops are often closed, and prices are high. WFP alone reaches more than 600,000 Ukrainians in frontline areas with food and cash assistance each month. It also organizes these weekly convoys using its fleet of trucks and its logistics expertise, carrying not only food but essential humanitarian supplies from other UN agencies and NGOs, like health and shelter items, with support from the European Union. But a surge in drone attacks over the last year has drastically complicated movements and deliveries, with trucks, passenger vehicles, as well as gas stations frequently targeted. Anti-drone nets, which have been erected by authorities over hundreds of kilometres of the main axes crossing frontline regions, only partially reduce the threat.Indeed, WFP’s own security incident tracking has recorded 120 security incidents affecting WFP operations and its cooperating partners in Ukraine since 2023. So far this year, 43 incidents have been recorded – more than triple the total recorded in all of 2023. "It was emotionally hard," Vasyl recalls. "The realization that my children could have been left without a father came later. That's probably the hardest part.“Before this incident, we were careful,” he adds. “Now we're three times more careful.”Born in a small town in western Ukraine’s Rivne region, Vasyl has been behind the wheel for twenty years: steering vans and buses long before the war. Even today, on the quieter drives along Ukraine’s sunflower fields, he sometimes stops to buy pies and fresh vegetables from roadside sellers to carry home to his wife and two daughters.His wife worries each time he leaves for a mission. He rarely shares the full details to spare her the distress; his daughters, though, are well aware of the risks and have always supported his decision to keep going. "You don't feel anything in the moment”Andrii (name changed for his security) has been working in the humanitarian field since 2012. In fourteen years, he had never experienced anything like the past year, when two convoys he was part of were struck.The first attack came in March 2026, in Donetsk region, within 20 kilometres of the frontline. Andrii was driving the tail vehicle when a drone hit the truck ahead of him."I thought it was just a branch falling. Then suddenly the truck caught on fire," he recalls. "Following protocol, I quickly backed up the car."His team pulled the injured driver from the cab and rushed him to the nearest hospital, where he underwent surgery. Everyone survived."You don't feel anything in the moment," Andrii says. "You're just doing your job. It's scary before and after. During, you just do what needs to be done. Afterward, when you start processing what happened, that's when the fear comes.”The second strike came this past July – 20 minutes from the frontline in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, as Andrii’s convoy was on its way back from delivering assistance."Our armoured vehicle was hit, and the whole car jumped up," Andrii says. "But thankfully everyone was safe. The car was still usable, so we continued our way back to Dnipro city." He describes a vigilance that never fully switches off. "We always look around when we drive. Of course it's frightening, it's always frightening,” he says, "because these hits come like lightning. You never know when it will start or when it will stop.”After the first strike, the image stayed with him: flashbacks surfacing at night;  the memory of a truck tearing apart, replaying at unexpected moments. “It gets harder and harder to keep driving,” he admits.But his commitment hasn't changed."Our job is to help people stay alive," Andrii says. "So we keep going. For us the goal of any mission stays the same: to return safely."For people waiting for these frontline deliveries, the WFP food boxes are a lifeline. Residents near these battle zones describe a daily struggle to access basic necessities in places where shops have shuttered and few opportunities exist to earn an income. Many remaining are elderly or live with disabilities. Even reaching shops in nearby areas can be dangerous."It's not easy for us to get to the shops because drones are constantly flying," says Tetiana, who lives in a frontline village in the southern Kherson region. "We don't know when they'll come for us." A road that feels like home“Work missions bring me home, even if it's only for an hour. I know every road, every turn,” says driver Oleksandr. ‘It feels like going back home.”His hometown lies just a few kilometres from the routes he now drives for work, close enough that he can almost see it. It’s just two fields away, he says, but still completely unreachable – on the other side of the frontline in occupied Donetsk region."It's a heavy nostalgia," he says. "Knowing your homeland is right there, and that you can't go."The land makes itself known as soon as you get near, the particular smell of Donbas, he says: the smoky metallic smell of terikony —large, coneshaped hills of mining by-products, a symbol of the Donbas landscape — mixed with scorched steppe grass and the sweetness of ripening summer orchards. It is a heavy agrarian region, thick with the odor of a place that has always lived off its soil."Even the air pressure feels different here," he says. "You just know you're home.”Despite the risks, Oleksandr, Andrii and Vasyl continue to help bring food and humanitarian assistance every week to hundreds of thousands of their fellow Ukrainians still living in frontline areas. Yet, since the beginning of the year, WFP has lost access to 354 settlements due to worsening security, leaving more than 15,000 people cut off who previously relied on humanitarian deliveries.WFP’s Logistics Cluster, which coordinates weekly humanitarian convoys to frontline areas of Ukraine, is generously funded by the European Union.

A hospital near the frontline must choose which services are needed the most. A community can clear only some of its damaged buildings and mines. A school must decide whether children can safely return. And there’s another one that needs rebuilding. A displaced family needs a home, but so do many others. A veteran needs work, and so does a woman with two kids. These choices affect lives.The United Nations uses data to provide accurate and reliable information, plan and coordinate humanitarian responses, manage programmes, report results, allocate resources, and communicate with the public. However, the UN relies on data not only in its own work. It also shares international experience with national authorities and institutions, so that, with limited resources and in harsh conditions, they can rely on reliable information to help people and communities. This is especially important in wartime Ukraine, where data helps answer three essential questions: Where is support needed? When should action be taken? What response will be most effective? Whether public or internal, data is essential for evidence-based decisions during emergencies and for planning recovery and reconstruction. Health services are essentialDuring war, a health facility may be standing but unable to provide essential services because of damaged equipment, staff shortages, interrupted communications, or power outages. Counting buildings is therefore not enough. Local authorities need to know which services people require and what health facilities can provide them. Health surveys, conducted by the WHO, document the impact of the war on the Ukrainian population. They are crucial for understanding which healthcare services people need the most, both short-term and long-term. On the other hand, the Health Resources and Services Availability Monitoring System (HeRAMS) helps local authorities to track the real-time functionality of health facilities across frontline and war-affected areas. For the latter, WHO, in partnership with the Ministry of Health, deployed a unified national emergency reporting system across all 24 oblasts, capturing more than 8,500 acute events and alerts and providing real-time analytics, enabling teams to respond faster, especially when power outages and communication disruptions make every minute critical. With data, the teams see not only where a facility is located but also whether it is operating, which services remain available, and where mobile medical teams are required. Going further, understanding the long-term impact of the war on the health of Ukrainians helps to plan the reform of the healthcare system as a whole. For example, support for mental health and psychological services has been traditionally overlooked. Now, they are generating more and more attention as more and more people report the psychological impact of the war. Understanding population, displacement, and housing needs With the start of the full-scale invasion, the population of Ukraine has experienced an unprecedented level of change, caused by casualties, displacements, and hardships. To help Ukraine better understand these changes, the United Nations Population Fund worked with the State Statistics Service of Ukraine (SSSU) to modernize data collection. One important step was the transition from paper-based interviews to computer-assisted telephone interviews, supported by the establishment of the statistics service’s own call centre. It’s estimated that 3.9 million people in Ukraine are internally displaced, while nearly 5.8 million Ukrainians are refugees abroad. The displacement is not static. People leave, come back, and leave again. To strengthen Ukraine’s collection of displacement data, UNHCR supported the addition of displacement-related questions to official household surveys, while IOM continues to operate the Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM). UNHCR also contributed to the Unified Information and Housing Analytical System (UIHAS), IDP Pathways and intention surveys, and the Ukraine Protection Survey in cooperation with the Office of the Ombudsman. These efforts translate evidence into practical support for returnees and IDPs, in particular in housing, employment, and public services.Making vulnerable groups visible Guided by the Leave No One Behind principle, the UN continues to support vulnerable groups. Children, women, displaced people, people with disabilities, and other groups may face specific challenges that are not visible unless data is sufficiently detailed. In 2025, UNICEF worked with the State Statistics Service of Ukraine to include child-focused indicators in the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) and the TransMonEE database. This allowed us to better understand and generate evidence of the complex realities of the children affected by the war in Ukraine through a target sample of 24,000 households in 1,000 clusters across all government-controlled regions. UN Women produced evidence to support gender-responsive energy policy, while ILO and UNICEF studied childcare, women’s economic empowerment, and the war’s impact on employment to inform regional recovery and the reintegration of displaced and vulnerable workers. UNODC research on trafficking and migrant smuggling risks among displaced people also informs Ukraine’s national anti-trafficking strategy. In addition, UNESCO supported a number of studies to assess the impact of the war on youth, children with special education needs, female journalists, etc. Across these initiatives, disaggregated data serves a common purpose: helping ensure that groups with distinct needs do not disappear inside national averages.Turning community needs into recovery decisions Local authorities understand the needs of their communities and people’s needs in ways outsiders often cannot. They are the key instrument of recovery decisions, but they need detailed information about damaged infrastructure, debris, public services, housing, and displacement trends in their communities. At the subnational level, UNDP strengthened local data and information management, including for debris assessment and management, while under the Strengthening Evidence-based recovery in Ukraine project, a nationwide diagnostic across 950+ communities generated baseline data that informed targeted GIS support to 5 pilot communities. International Organization of Migration, in turn, worked with the Ministry for Recovery, Infrastructure, and Transport of Ukraine to launch a unified geospatial system for monitoring the development of regions and territorial communities (GIS RD). The tool supports Ukraine’s decentralization efforts and will allow local communities to collect and analyze data critical for decision-making on recovery and development. Lastly, UN-Habitat worked with partners to improve Ukraine’s national urban planning database, while UNESCO assessed and confirmed damage to 514 cultural sites. These initiatives, while being quite technical, answer highly practical questions: What are the safety risks for the community? Which neighbourhoods lack essential services? Where should limited recovery funding go first? And how to build back better? From data to actionWhile data cannot repair a hospital, provide a home, or rebuild a cultural site, it connects needs with decisions and decisions with resources. It also strengthens accountability by allowing institutions and the public to ask not only how much support was provided, but where it went and what changed as a result. The data work is often invisible: a dataset added, a database connected, a survey conducted, a reporting system modernized, or a map updated. Yet behind every figure is a house, a community, a family, or a service. Reliable data makes them visible to the United Nations, the government, donors, and partners. So let’s make every count matter.More information on the UN's work in Ukraine in the field of data is available at the link.