At least 85 children have died and nearly 100 have been wounded in the fighting in Ukraine, the office of Ukraine’s attorney-general said in a statement on Sunday, citing data from the country’s juvenile prosecutors.
The figure is higher than that provided by the United Nations human rights body, which reported on Saturday that 42 children had died. The United Nations has acknowledged that its tallies are probably an undercount.
Ukraine’s attorney-general’s office said that among those killed was a young football player who was in a car attempting to evacuate with other civilians on Friday when Russian artillery struck the vehicle.
The statement adds to other accounts of children who were killed as they tried to flee the violence, including a nine-year-old and an 18-year-old who died last week as they ran across a damaged bridge in the town of Irpin, trying to evacuate to Kyiv.
The report also provides new evidence for what humanitarian organisations have called a crisis facing children in Ukraine, with more than a million having fled the country since Russian forces invaded on February 24.
Among the incidents cited in the attorney-general’s report was a child who was killed in a car at a checkpoint on Friday in the Kharkiv region in eastern Ukraine, where some of the heaviest fighting has occurred. A three-year-old died on Saturday along with family members when their car was attacked, the report said, and in Mariupol, a six-year-old-girl died of dehydration on Tuesday after her mother was killed.
The report said that most of the child victims were in the regions of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Donetsk, Sumy, Kherson, Mykolaiv and Zhytomyr. It added that 369 educational institutions had been damaged by bombing and shelling, and 57 completely destroyed.
(New York Times News Service)