Maintenance of peace and security of Ukraine - Security Council, 10050th meeting

Nearly four years into the war in Ukraine, attacks continue to escalate and casualties keep rising — with figures from January to October 2025 already surpassing the total for all of last year — a senior UN official told the Security Council today, calling for intensified diplomatic efforts towards a just and lasting peace. 

“No region of Ukraine is safe,” said Kayoko Gotoh, Officer-in-Charge, Europe, Central Asia and Americas Division, Departments of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and Peace Operations, noting that, in Kyiv alone, civilian casualties in the first ten months of 2025 were nearly 3.8 times higher than in 2024. 

Edem Wosornu, Director of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ Crisis Response Division, reported that “relentless” missile and drone strikes — “day and night” — are killing and injuring civilians, destroying homes and damaging critical civilian infrastructure in Ukraine. She also described growing power outages amid freezing temperatures, older people trapped without reliable access to water or medical care, civilians cut off from humanitarian assistance and an October missile strike on a children’s hospital in Kherson. “This pattern of attacks risks eroding an international legal framework that has taken more than a century to build,” she underscored.