LAST UPDATE | 4 Jun 2023
UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT VOLODYMYR Zelenskyy has said that Russia’s war, now in its 16th month, has killed at least 500 Ukrainian children.
Zelenskyy provided the number hours after rescue workers found the body of a two-year-old girl who died in one of the latest Russian strikes.
The president said in a statement that “Russian weapons and hatred, which continue to take and destroy the lives of Ukrainian children every day”, killed the hundreds who had perished since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine started on February 24, 2022.
“Many of them could have become famous scholars, artists, sports champions, contributing to Ukraine’s history,” he said.
The toddler’s body was pulled from the rubble left by a Russian strike on a residential area.
Authorities said the mother of the girl, who was identified as Yelyzaveta Pryhodka, remained in intensive care.
The girl’s father, who recovered her body according to an official, was at work when the building was hit.
Officials said 22 people were wounded in the strike.
Five other children were in hospital after the strike, with three boys in a serious condition, they added.
13-year-old Dmytro from Kharkiv, 4-year-old Lisa from Vinnytsia, Serhii from Novosolone who was just 2 days old. They are among five hundred innocent children whose lives were destroyed by Russia's onslaught.
— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) June 4, 2023
Many of them could have become famous scholars, artists, sports… pic.twitter.com/ahXeGP0XY6
Zelenskyy said it was impossible to establish the exact number of children who were casualties due to the ongoing hostilities and because some areas are under Russian occupation.
“We must hold out and win this war!” he said. “All of Ukraine, all our people, all our children, must be free from the Russian terror.”
Rescuers found the two-year-old’s body early today while combing through the rubble of an apartment building in the suburbs of the central city of Dnipro.
The regional governor, Serhiy Lysak, said five children were among 22 people injured by yesterday’s attack, which damaged two residential buildings.
The Russians launched more strikes with drones and cruise missiles today, targeting multiple areas of the country, including the capital, Kyiv.
The Ukrainian air force said the country’s air defences downed three of the five Shahed self-exploding drones and four of the six cruise missiles fired.
Ukrainian air force spokesman Yurii Ihnat said two missiles struck a military air base in Kropyvnytskyi, a city in central Ukraine’s Kyrovohrad province. He did not report what damage they caused.
The Russian army said it hit the Ukrainian military airfields with long-range weapons overnight.
“Today at night, the armed forces of the Russian Federation carried out a group strike with long-range precision-guided air-launched weapons against enemy targets at military airfields,” the Russian army said in a statement.
The long-range strikes come as Ukraine prepares for a long-expected counteroffensive in which it hopes to reclaim more ground.
Concerns over civilian safety were exacerbated after officials announced that nearly a quarter of the 4,800 air raid shelters they inspected were locked or unusable.
The acknowledgment came after a 33-year-old woman in Kyiv reportedly died while waiting outside a shuttered shelter during a Russian missile barrage on Thursday.
Prosecutors in the capital said four people were detained as part of a criminal probe into the woman’s death as she and others waited to enter a locked shelter.
A security guard who allegedly failed to unlock the doors remained in custody. Three others, including a local official, were placed under house arrest.
Mayor of Kyiv Vitali Klitschko said yesterday that city authorities received “more than a thousand” complaints regarding locked, dilapidated or insufficient air-raid shelters within a day of launching an online feedback service.
The governor of Russia’s Belgorod region on the border with Ukraine said today that fighting was ongoing on his side of the frontier and acknowledged pro-Ukrainian forces had taken Russians prisoner during cross-border clashes.
Vyacheslav Gladkov said he was ready for talks to retrieve “our guys” from the saboteur fighters who say they have taken Russian soldiers prisoner in the Belgorod region.
It was the first time a Russian official had admitted to the capture of prisoners on Moscow’s territory by pro-Ukraine forces during the more than 15 months of conflict.
The pro-Kyiv groups made up of Russians, the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Legion for Freedom of Russia, had earlier called on the Belgorod governor to meet fighters and retrieve captive soldiers.
“The only thing stopping me from negotiating with them is our guys that are in their hands, maybe they are already dead,” Gladkov said.
He said fighting was ongoing in the border village of Novaya Tavolzhanka.
Ukraine has intensively shelled Russian settlements on the border this week, forcing thousands to flee to the regional hub of Belgorod.
Russia’s army subsequently claimed to have repelled a “sabotage group of Ukrainian terrorists” seeking to cross the frontier near to the settlement.
“The enemy was hit by artillery. The enemy scattered and retreated,” it said in a statement.
In Belgorod, AFP saw volunteers handing humanitarian aid to Russians fleeing border regions.
Ukraine has consistently not claimed responsibility for attacks on Russian soil, but presidential advisor Mykhaylo Podolyak said today the situation in the border areas “should be viewed as the future of Russia”.
Russia also unleashed a series of air assaults on Kyiv during the past week, including rare daytime strikes.
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