Currently, at least 1664 children have suffered in Ukraine as a result of the Russian full-scale armed aggression.
As of the morning of December 5, 2023, according to official information from juvenile prosecutors, 512 children were killed and more than 1152 were injured.
These figures are not complete. Work is ongoing to establish the data in the hostilities areas of the occupied and liberated territories.
Most children were injured in Donetsk region – 497, Kharkiv – 304, Kherson – 139, Kyiv – 129, Zaporizhzhia – 100, Mykolaiv – 97, Dnipro – 97, Chernihiv – 72, Luhansk – 67.
The recent case was on December 4, when the body of an 8-year-old girl was found during rescue operations and rubble removal from a residential building destroyed by shelling on November 29, 2023, in Novohrodivka, Donetsk region.
The killing and injury of Ukrainian children are not the only cases of Russian war crimes – recently, it was reported that the name and surname of a child from Kherson, who was taken before the city was liberated in November 2022, was illegally changed.
10-month-old Margarita Prokopenko was in an orphanage in Kherson during the Russian occupation of the city. From there, she was taken to Russia, allegedly for “medical examinations and rehabilitation.” Media reports say that the girl’s name and citizenship were changed later. Thus, Margarita became Marina Mironova. It is also known that a two-year-old boy, Ilya Vashchenko, was probably taken with the girl. His fate is not yet known.
The adoption of Ukrainian children in Russia is illegal. According to international and national norms, for foreigners to adopt a Ukrainian child, they need to notify Ukraine and obtain consent for the adoption. However, Russia is trying to get around this and forcibly grants Ukrainian children Russian citizenship.
Such actions by the Russian Federation grossly violate the 1949 Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, which stipulates the obligation of the occupying power not to change the civil status of children, as well as the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
More from Gwara
City Council: Kharkiv plans to open a kindergarten underground. Children can go to kindergarten at a metro station for the first time in Ukraine during the war. The City Council Executive Committee supported organizing the educational process in groups for preschool children at metro stations.
Ukraine has already brought back 2,598 people as of November 22, 2023, according to Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights. Since March 11, 2022, a total of 48 exchanges have taken place.
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