513 Ukrainian children have been killed by Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. More than 1,680 Ukrainian children sustained injuries of varying severity and some of them became disabled as the result of Russia's attacks on civilians. The data has been reported by the Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office (PGO).
Number of Ukrainian children, killed or injured in Russia’s attacks on civilians increased
As of the morning of 30 December 2023, 513 Ukrainian kids were killed and more than 1,167 suffered injuries of varying severity, the Ukrainian juvenile prosecutors said.
The figures are not final. Investigations in the areas of hostilities, in the temporarily occupied and liberated territories, are underway, the authorities said.
The most children were affected in Donetsk — 497, Kharkiv — 304, Kherson — 141, Kyiv — 129, Dnipropetrovsk — 105, Zaporizhia — 100, Mykolaiv — 97, Chernihiv — 72, Luhansk — 67.
The officials added that on 29 December, six children were injured as a result of massive Russian shelling of Ukrainian cities.
a 6-year-old boy and 8-year-old girl were injured in Odesa;
a 14-year-old boy was wounded in Lviv;
an 18-month-old boy and a 15-year-old child were injured in Dnipro;
a 15-year-old girl was injured in Smila, Cherkasy region.
Russia not only kills, but also abducts Ukrainian children
On Children's Day in 2023, the Online.UA team presented the documentary project Crippled Childhood, which tells the stories of Ukrainian children who were abducted and forcibly deported to Russia.
In the film Crippled Childhood, children and their parents openly share their stories: some of them have been in captivity, some have been forcibly taken to a "rehabilitation camp", some have been separated from their parents during so-called filtration measures.
It is important to understand that in more than a year and a half of full-scale war, Ukraine has managed to return less than 400 children. At the same time, Russia claims to have "evacuated" 744,000 Ukrainian children.
Since diplomacy with the aggressor country is not working, Russia continues to illegally take children from the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.
However, this is not an evacuation, as the Russians claim, but a mass abduction of underage Ukrainian citizens.
The project documents the testimonies of children about war crimes committed by Russia against the Ukrainian people.
