Every June 1, Ukraine, like many other countries, including Russia, celebrates Children's Day to remember the need to protect minors. It is usually a happy day for the little ones and yesterday many of them smiled again at the parties that were organized for them in various parts of the country. There were costumes and bubbles at a Kyiv children's hospital and parades in traditional dress in the massacred city of Bucha. Scenes of joy clouded by a terrible reality: nearly 700 children have been killed or injured since the Russian invasion began, which is 100 days old tomorrow.
Eight school buses whose occupants were stuffed animals instead of children embodied on Wednesday in Lviv, the 243 lives of minors mowed down since the beginning of the Russian invasion on February 24. The Ukrainian president, Volodímir Zelenski, gave this figure in his speech yesterday, to which he added the 446 injured children and the 139 bodies that disappeared.
In other words, every day more than two children are killed and more than four are injured in Ukraine, according to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). , "most in attacks with explosive weapons in populated areas". But they are "only those we know," warned the president. He fears the figure is much higher, especially in the Russian-occupied territories, where international organizations have no access.
"Each one of them is a world destroyed by the Russian army," Zelensky lamented yesterday when giving the names and stories behind ten little ones who are no longer there. In addition, he charged that 200,000 children have been forcibly taken to Russia, including children from orphanages, children taken with their parents, and others who were separated from their families. The Kremlin has not confirmed these data on people evacuated to their country.
There are those who are not. And those who survive. Two out of three do so away from home, some within the country, others abroad. School, the most precious place for a child, has vanished for more than 7.5 million of them, according to Save the Children. At least 1,888 of them have been attacked since the war broke out on February 24, a figure that doubles the number of schools attacked in eastern Ukraine between 2014 and 2021.
"Every conflict is a war against children, they get the worst of it, they are the most vulnerable, those with the fewest resources and pay for the terror committed by others," lamented this Thursday the director of International Cooperation and Humanitarian Action of Save the Children, Vicente Raimundo Núñez-Flores, at a press conference. He has also warned that the trauma of being in a war for 100 days "is a damage that if not stopped will be permanent."
The hundred days of the Russian invasion have left dozens of images whose protagonists are the most innocent victims of any war. In each face, a story. Like that of Artem Shevchenko, a 15-year-old who was killed by a Russian bomb in mid-April in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest city, was his grandmother's "golden ray of sunshine", his mother's reason for living. Or that of Sasha, 4 years old, and her sister Ksenia, 8, children of a family that has decided to stay in Lysychansk, jumped on a bed in a basement, oblivious to the advances of the Russian army in the neighboring city of Severodonetsk, 10 kilometers away and which it controls almost entirely, in the east of the country.
It is also the story of the boy whom a France Presse photographer captured with his camera on a deserted street in Soledar. A town in the Donetsk region that had 11,000 inhabitants before the war, but now only a few are left hiding in bunkers. Separated by just five kilometers from the front line, the town has suffered in recent days the incessant bombardment of the Russian artillery for being in the middle of the main road that leads to the besieged Severodonetsk. It is also the cry of that child who was evacuated on Monday in a humanitarian corridor from the town of Kupiansk occupied by Russian forces, while the Russian bombardment continued on the outskirts of Kharkiv.
Who knows what the girl who got off a bus with her stuffed animal in hand in Zaporizhia may have experienced, after being evacuated in early May from Mariupol, almost completely destroyed in more than two months of Russian bombing. About 80 kilometers north of Zaporizhia, where one of the country's largest humanitarian aid centers has been established to care for people fleeing the Russian onslaught in Donbass, is Dnipro. From there, the Save the Children aid worker, Neus Arnal, explained that the NGO has served 106,631 people, of which 61,687 are minors, and has 11 safe spaces open for children.
