Russian strikes have killed or wounded more Ukrainian civilians in the first eight months of 2026 than in all of last year, a senior United Nations official told the Security Council, Censor.net reported. The official warned that the toll keeps climbing as missiles and drones increasingly reach cities far from the front line. She also cautioned that mounting attacks on Ukraine's battered energy grid could push millions into a dark, cold winter.

In the war's fifth year, Russia's long-range strikes on Ukrainian cities have shifted the danger from the front to the streets where people live, and the rising civilian toll now tracks how far those weapons reach.

Casualties outpace all of 2025

Rosemary DiCarlo, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, gave the toll as the Council met on Ukraine, Ukrinform reported.

"In just the first eight months, more civilians were killed or injured in Ukraine than in all of 2025," she said.

The heavy toll already recorded in September shows the trend continuing, she added, as strikes hit populated areas away from the front.

The UN human rights office has confirmed at least 17,257 civilians killed since February 2022, including 835 children. Another 53,693 people have been wounded, among them 3,247 children, and DiCarlo said the real numbers are likely far higher. Kyiv and other cities have faced near-daily attacks in recent weeks, she said, with strikes hitting railways, shopping centers, gas stations, warehouses, and food and logistics firms.

A warning over the coming winter

DiCarlo said the mounting strikes on Ukraine's already-damaged energy infrastructure are especially worrying with another war winter near.

"The cumulative impact of these strikes could plunge millions of people into darkness and cold in the coming months," she said.

She urged an immediate moratorium on strikes on populated areas and urgent action to protect the power grid. Targeting civilians and civilian sites is prohibited under international law, she noted.

The warning follows the deadliest stretch of the war for civilians, when UN monitors counted 437 people killed in July, the worst monthly toll since May 2022. Russia has also renewed strikes on gas production and power plants ahead of the heating season.

Neria Leiter, a reserve soldier, sustained life-threatening injuries after a Palestinian man drove into a military checkpoint in the West Bank, the Israeli military said.

© Ammar Awad/Reuters

Neria Leiter, a reserve soldier, sustained life-threatening injuries after a Palestinian man drove into a military checkpoint in the West Bank, the Israeli military said.

© Ammar Awad/Reuters

OpenAI, the US company behind ChatGPT, will hand Ukraine's government free access to a cyber-defense system and its most powerful artificial-intelligence (AI) model, Ukrainian defense outlet Militarnyi reported. The company unveiled the deal alongside the UN General Assembly, pitching it as a cyber shield for the hospitals and power plants Russia keeps targeting.

Russia's war on Ukraine runs through wires as much as skies. Its hackers have hammered energy, transport, and defense networks for years, on top of the blackouts its missiles already force on Ukrainian cities—and Western tech firms have kept stepping in to help hold the line.

What the Daybreak system does

The tool is called Daybreak. It scans digital systems, finds their weak points fast, and helps specialists close them, the report said. Daybreak handles the whole job on its own—a loop of inventory, detection, verification, assignment, remediation, and confirming the fix held.

The system is meant to shield civilian infrastructure, hospitals and power stations among it, from cyberattacks, BBC reported. Ukraine's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UA) logged nearly 6,000 cyberattacks in 2025.

Ukraine also gets OpenAI's top model

The agreement opens access to GPT 5.6 Sol, OpenAI's flagship and strongest model. The company built it for complex professional work—programming, research, science, and cybersecurity, the report said. Both come as part of one agreement between OpenAI and Kyiv.

George Osborne—Britain's former chancellor and now Head of OpenAI for Countries—put the aim plainly.

"Protecting civilian infrastructure means defending it against both physical and digital attacks, so people can continue to live, work and access essential services," he said.

Independent analysts called the deal useful but not unprecedented. Rafe Pilling of cyber firm Sophos said it could serve as a force multiplier for a Ukrainian cyber defense that is already highly capable but heavily burdened. Jamie MacColl of the Royal United Services Institute noted that Western tech firms have been supporting Ukraine for some time, partly altruistically but also because they gain valuable intelligence from an active conflict, and that Ukraine already has access to AI tools from OpenAI's competitors, including Google. The same frontier AI capabilities cut both ways—spotting weaknesses helps defenders block hackers and attackers find a way in.

OpenAI's rival Anthropic has restricted access to its most powerful cyber models on those grounds, while OpenAI has opened them to some European firms and UK banks, BBC reported.