Since February 2022, Russia has carried out more than 167,000 attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine—more than 100 a day, every day, for over four years. Civilian casualties in December 2025–May 2026 rose 40% compared to the same period the previous year, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission reported in late June. On 1 July, Ukraine put those numbers on the record of the UN General Assembly— and made a specific argument about what they mean.
"Russia systematically uses terrorist methods as an instrument of state policy." Said Artem Bondarenko, chief of staff of the SBU Anti-Terrorist Center, on the 95th plenary meeting of the 80th General Assembly
The forum mattered: the 95th plenary was the ninth review of the UN Global Counterterrorism Strategy, a framework adopted by all 193 member states that is explicitly about state policy, not individual commanders. Ukraine was not filing a war crimes complaint. It was arguing that Russia's conduct fits a category the entire international community has already agreed to condemn.
Bondarenko described energy strikes designed to deprive millions of people of heat and water in extreme cold, the recruitment of Ukrainian minors for sabotage through online platforms, and the occupation of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant combined with Russia's deployment of nuclear weapons in Belarus," an unprecedented environment of nuclear pressure and intimidation affecting the entire European continent," he told the Assembly.
At the same session, Russia took the floor—in the explanation-of-vote phase, before Ukraine's speech in the general debate. Its delegate said Moscow was "prepared to have mutually respectful cooperation with all states who really are interested in an effective, uncompromising fight against terrorism," and named as a priority the need "to protect civilian objects, in particular energy facilities." Russia was not acknowledging a contradiction. It was claiming the same language, inside the same framework, as a co-author of international counterterrorism norms.
Earlier that morning, the United States had voted against the resolution that Ukraine welcomed. The US delegation called it "not fit for purpose"—"bloated, outdated, and lacking focus." The resolution passed 140–3. It is non-binding.
The General Assembly cannot enforce. The Security Council can—but Russia holds a veto. What Ukraine is building is a legal and political record: testimony, ICC arrest warrants already issued against two Russian commanders for energy strikes, UN human rights findings that those strikes "appear to have violated fundamental principles of international humanitarian law." The record feeds proceedings that may take years. On 1 July, the room where that record was made included the country that filled it.
