It is not known for sure, so far, how many children were killed in the Ukrainian War. In addition to burying their dead, adults or not, the country is more involved in military and medical emergencies or in providing food for its traumatized population.
UNICEF, the UN children’s agency, estimates, rather imprecisely, that two-thirds of Ukraine’s 7.5 million children have been displaced from the cities where they lived for just over two months. They are refugees with their parents in countries like Poland or they remain under the care of humanitarian institutions to find a family to replace the one that the war killed.
This rather sad set of information was the subject of a BBC podcast, “Saving Ukraine’s Children”. The British public broadcaster, instead of looking for cases in all major cities, focused its attention on Mariupol, to the south-east of Ukrainian territory and the most martyred by Russian bombings.
An evangelical pastor, Guennadi Motchkenko, stayed for long days with the custody of orphans or children with missing parents in a group of industrial buildings, which Russian soldiers surrounded without, however, destroying it with bombs. “Food started to run out and then there was also no water to drink. The children were crying from hunger and thirst. Unable to convince the Russians to let in provisions, I started crying too.”
And it was not a siege, so to speak, smooth. The noise of the engines of planes that dropped bombs on the city and the explosions of buildings that collapsed acted as a permanent threat. The pastor didn’t say so explicitly, but the logic was to fear that they might be the next target.
Humanitarian organizations set up convoys to remove children from territories constantly bombed by the Russians, but the truce for the passage of vehicles was not always respected. “International agreements don’t work,” reports one humanitarian activist. When least expected, the aggressors returned to dropping their bombs or using the heavy artillery of the tanks.
Once again, there are no statistics on children killed or injured during the breaking of the truce.
There are also platoons of Russian soldiers who stop buses full of children and force them out of the vehicles to be searched for resistant adults. Children cry, faced with an aggression they do not understand.
An elder approached NGO activists to report that his 27-year-old adopted daughter was killed by Russian missiles that destroyed the building where she lived. She had a 3-year-old son whose whereabouts remained unknown. The NGO had no information about the child.
The head of a day care center for refugee children, named Vasilina Dubsilo, told the BBC that the little ones sing songs they learned in the past at school, draw and play outdoors. But who, suddenly, become aggressive and start asking about the whereabouts of their parents.
Sometimes the orphanage takes in teenage girls, and that’s when the most horrible of crimes is discovered. Russian soldiers kidnap young girls to use them as objects of sexual pleasure. Russia told the BBC only that its men were not allowed to behave in such a way.
The same sexual violence had already been denounced in the two wars in Chechnya, to return to an old story in which the Russians were also in the spotlight on the subject of human rights.
And, changing the subject, an activist reports that orphans housed in makeshift institutions have far fewer problems in regions militarily controlled by Ukraine. If the Russians are in control, children tend to be treated very roughly and are disrespected, without the slightest courtesy.
Another advances the number of 6,000 to quantify girls and boys who have lost a father, mother or both. The figure would be the product of the exchange of information between entities most active in this area.
The radio program finally breathes with good news. Ukrainians Olha and Andril, married for almost four years, speak English well and managed to cross the border into Poland, where a humanitarian organization took care of Olha and transported her to Canada. Andril stayed in Ukraine, at the disposal of the Army — but he has not yet been drafted.
