As of the morning of 28 March, 537 children have been killed in Ukraine as a result of Russia’s armed aggression. This was reported by the press service of the Prosecutor General’s Office, Komersant ukrainskyi reports.
More than 1269 children have been injured of varying severity. These figures are not final. Work is underway to establish them in the areas of hostilities, in the temporarily occupied and liberated territories.
Most children were injured in the following regions: Donetsk – 524, Kharkiv – 343, Kherson – 149, Kyiv – 130, Dnipropetrovs’k – 125, Mykolaiv – 103, Zaporizhzhia – 100.
on 27 March, a 12-year-old boy died as a result of a Russian strike on the village of Borova in Kharkiv region, and four children aged three months to thirteen years were injured in the shelling of Kharkiv.
Abduction of Ukrainian children by Russia
on 1 February 2024, the Prosecutor General of Ukraine Andriy Kostin reported that during the war, Russia forcibly removed 19,546 children from Ukraine under the guise of “humanitarian operations”.
“These children are not only displaced, but also deprived of their Ukrainian identity: they are granted Russian citizenship, placed in Russian families, forced to undergo re-education in Russian, and forbidden to speak Ukrainian. Teenage boys are often forced to participate in militarisation programmes,”
– Kostin said.
At the same time, this estimate of the scale of abductions of Ukrainian children is not the only one and certainly not the highest. In particular, the main organiser of these abductions, the so-called Commissioner for Children’s Rights in the Russian Federation, Maria Lvova-Belova, in the summer of 2023, mentioned the figure of 744,000 Ukrainian children “taken by the Russian Federation”. Russia does not provide any data on this process and is not accountable to anyone, so it is almost impossible to verify the veracity of this statement.
Daria Gerasymchuk, the Ukrainian Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, questions the figure quoted by Belova and believes that it is a standard exaggeration of Russian propaganda. The Ukrainian side estimates that there may be 200-300,000 abducted Ukrainian children. These estimates are approximate, as we are talking about children from the occupied territories and information about them is collected in a variety of ways.
However, the Ukrainian side has absolutely accurate data on abductions, including personal data, only for 19,546 children. That is why this figure is officially announced, although everyone understands that it is quite far from reality.