The United Nations Children’s Fund announced that more than 1.5 million children have fled Ukraine since the war began.
The humanitarian agency said such a number accounts for about 75,000 children each day — “particularly shocking” when put in the perspective of time.
“Every single minute, 55 children have fled their country,” UNICEF spokesman James Elder said Tuesday. “That is, a Ukrainian child has become a refugee almost every single second since the start of the war.”
The refugee crisis is showing no signs of slowing down. Roughly 3 million Ukrainians have fled the country as the invasion approaches the three-week mark of war.
Elder said child refugees are at particular risk of harm.
“This refugee crisis is in terms of speed and scale, unprecedented since the Second World War,” Elder said. “Like all children driven from their homes by war and conflict, Ukrainian children arriving in neighbouring countries are at significant risk of family separation, violence, sexual exploitation, and trafficking. They are in desperate need of safety, stability, and child protection services, especially those who are unaccompanied or have been separated from their families.”
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Elder said he just visited the western Ukrainian city of Lviv for two weeks, where pediatricians had received 60 children in one night. The children were sent from Kyiv with wounds of war.
The doctors told him they were using stickers to prioritize treatment: “Green sticker — leave the child for now, yellow — the child needs medical assistance now, red — the child is critical, black sticker — they will not be able to save the child.”
As of Wednesday morning, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova said that 103 children have died thus far in the war, and more than 100 have been injured in Russian attacks.
“[Russians] kill at least 5 of our children daily,” Venediktova said in a Facebook post. “This morning, the official figure crossed the critical and terrible 100 mark. The data is not final — at the hottest spots and temporarily occupied territories, prosecutors and law enforcement have no chance to inspect the scene of the shooting.
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Venediktova added that more than 400 schools have been bombed across Ukraine, with 59 of them completely destroyed. She called on the United Nations to assess the violations of Ukrainian children’s rights amid the war.
