In all wars, it is children who suffer first and suffer most.-Catherine Russell, UNICEF Executive Director
This morning, I came across a piece posted by Clay Jones just two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine.
The post lamented the fact that Vladimir Putin had already murdered 38 children.
A cartoon (I hate to call an image of horror and inhumanity a “cartoon”), above, alluded at how, while parents were grieving over the bodies of their children, Putin “was enjoying some lavish dining.”
Barely two weeks later, as if to confirm Putin’s cruelty and savagery, a Russian missile hit the train station in Kramatrosk, Ukraine, as passengers, mostly women and children, tried to flee the fighting. According to the AP, 61 people were killed and 135 wounded. Painted on the remnants of the missile were the words in Russian “For the Children.”
Eighteen months into this cruel “special military operation,” UNICEF reported that at least 545 children had been killed “the equivalent of a child dying every day since the war escalated.” The report adds, “At least 1,156 children have been injured.”
A week before Christmas, a season of joy especially for the innocent, as temperatures were dropping to below freezing in an already devastated Ukraine, UNICEF updated the sinister figure to around 1,800 children killed or injured, adding, “the true number is likely higher.” They died and were injured at home, on playgrounds, in kindergartens and in schools, in church, in hospitals – some newborn babies died or were injured in maternity wards.
At year’s end, and continuing into the new year, Russia unleashed the largest aerial attacks of the war. Ruthless bombardments that, on top of previous ones, have “left millions of children across Ukraine without sustained access to electricity, heating and water, exposing them to additional serious harm as temperatures plummet,” according to UNICEF.
But these atrocities committed by the Russians against the most vulnerable are not the only ones.
In addition to forcing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children to flee their homes, leaving thousands of them traumatized, vulnerable to abuse, sexual exploitation, and other depravations, Russia has committed other heinous crimes against Ukrainian children. Some of them are classified as war crimes by international human right organizations.
Perhaps one of the clearest crimes against humanity is the grim fact that Russia has kidnapped, abducted, forcibly transferred, deported to Russian controlled territories, (so-called “evacuations” from the frontline), and “facilitated” the adoption by Russians of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children, thousands “relocated” to “a network of more than 40 camps and facilities stretching from Russian-occupied Crimea to Siberia.”
Exact numbers of Ukrainian children illegally deported or forcibly transferred to Russian-controlled territories are hard to pin down in the chaos of war, but it is estimated to be between 300,000 and 700,000.
On April 27, 2023, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted a resolution recognizing the forced transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia as genocide.
Throughout history man has committed atrocities against the most vulnerable.
During the Holocaust, the Nazis murdered approximately one and a half million Jewish children.
Millions more children lost their lives during the wider Second World War.
The two atomic bombs dropped over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would kill, maim, disfigure and sicken tens of thousands of children.
The 1994 Rwanda genocide claimed the lives of approximately 300,000 children.
The United Nations reports that between 2006 and 2022, “131.311 children have been killed or maimed across conflict situations….” The Independent notes, “These numbers are woefully low estimates…”
Now we come to the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, an orgy of evil and atrocity that will go down as one of the worst acts of terror in modern history.
On that day – in one day — over 1,000 Hamas terrorists indiscriminately and savagely burned, mutilated and killed around 1,200 human beings, including 36 children. The youngest victim was a 10-month-old baby. Some of the bodies so mutilated – including entire families in their homes – that “it has taken forensic doctors weeks to identify them all.”
In swift retaliation, Israel launched a devastating attack on Gaza that has thus far has killed more than 22,000 Palestinians, including more than 8,000 children.
Tens of thousands of children have been injured, while hundreds of thousands have been made homeless, displaced, herded into even tinier areas in what is already one of the most densely populated regions in the world.
James Denslow from Save the Children says, “This is the highest number of children killed and maimed in one conflict since 2006 when United Nations records began.” He adds, “In an ocean of human misery and in a world that seems to be falling apart, Gaza stands out.”
This writing is not meant to assign responsibility, to cast blame or culpability to any one party.
When such unspeakable tragedies occur, humanity itself has failed — we are all to blame.
The question is, what can we do about it?
I don’t have an answer, but the words of Graça Machel, the widow former President of South Africa Nelson Mandela, may be a beginning: “The impact of armed conflict on children is everyone’s responsibility. And it must be everyone’s concern.”
