A group of 19 children, most of them orphans, are “in great danger”, trapped in a sanatorium in Mariupol, a Ukrainian city besieged by Russian forces, their relatives and eyewitnesses told the French Agency today.
Children and teenagers, aged 4 to 17, were sent to this children’s clinic specializing in the treatment of lung disease, before the Russian offensive began on 24 February.
They are now “in great danger” as their guardians could not get them back because of the fighting in this city that has been bombed for several weeks, an eyewitness, Alexei Volostuk, told AFP.
He took refuge inside the sanatorium, before being forced to leave the besieged city that suffers from lack of water, gas and electricity and where almost all communications are cut off.
Arriving in Zaporizhia on Friday, Volostuk said the children lived in icy basements and had not been washed for more than two weeks as Russian rockets landed near the clinic in recent days.
“There is no heating, it is cold. One of the little girls, about eight years old, showed me a sore on her face caused by the cold.” According to him, a “heroic” pulmonologist, a cook and two nurses are taking care of the children, while the local police are taking the food, which is being cooked outside, to a fire near the sanatorium building.
But food can run out quickly and there can be shortages, he said.
One of the guardians, Olga Lopatkina, a manager and her husband at a private orphanage in Uglendar, 100 km north of Mariupol, told AFP that she had sent six of her six to 17-year-old children to the sanatorium in January.
After the start of the Russian attack, she left her city with the other children to reach Lviv, in western Ukraine, then Hungary before finally arriving in France. She desperately tries to get the children left behind in Mariupol to go near her.
But residents can only leave the city in their own cars.
In Geneva, the charity Stop TB says it is “extremely worried” about these children.
The TB Foundation would like the children to be admitted to other countries, but “the biggest problem is getting them out of there,” chief executive Lucica Ditiou told AFP, adding that she was “in despair”.
“They are orphans; the most vulnerable,” he sighs. Thinking about the four adults who have been trapped with them, he adds: “I dare not imagine what it could be like to be trapped with 19 children in a basement without water or food.”
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