In the three weeks since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to invade Ukraine, innocent children and their mothers have not been spared from the ravages of war — and many have been slain as they shelter or flee for their lives.
On Wednesday, a theater in Mariupol — where hundreds of people had been taking shelter in the besieged coastal city — was bombed by a Russian airstrike, according to local authorities. Satellite pictures show that the theater was marked with large white letters that read “CHILDREN” in Russian.
“A children’s hospital. A maternity hospital. How did they threaten the Russian Federation?” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked in a video address. “What kind of country is this, the Russian Federation, which is afraid of hospitals, afraid of maternity hospitals, and destroys them?”
Zelensky said on Wednesday that since the launch of Russia’s onslaught last month, at least 103 children have been killed. But the death toll is expected to be higher, especially once the devastation in blockaded cities like Mariupol is assessed. Most of the known deaths took place in the cities of Kyiv, Kherson, Kharkiv and Donetsk, the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office said.
Of the more than 3 million Ukrainians who have fled the country seeking safe refuge, some 1.5 million are children, according to the United Nations, which calculated that roughly every second, a child in Ukraine is becoming a war refugee. Now, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder said, it’s feared those children on the run from their war-torn homes are prey for human traffickers.
Children under fire
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What happened this week in Ukraine? Check out this explainer from Yahoo Immersive to find out.
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