Millions of Ukrainian children are suffering as a result of Vladimir Putin's invasion of their country. Many have lost their parents and hardly any are able to attend school. What does the future hold?
It’s a recent morning in December, and Arina Pervunina is talking about the most difficult moment of her life. Her father, she says, also earned the right to be remembered. Fathers who fall at the front, she points out, receive posthumous medals. But Andriy Pervunin died as he was trying to save his children – right in front of his 12-year-old daughter."I don’t want my father to be forgotten," she says.
Arina is sitting at the kitchen table, nestled up close to her mother. The two of them are talking about the first days of the war, when Arina’s father was on a business trip for his internet company. The parents initially evacuated Arina with her eight-year-old brother Matviy and two cousins out of the bombarded city of Odessa to their grandparents in the countryside near Kherson."We thought it would be safe there," says the mother."But then the Russians came.
According to Ukrainian accounts, 450 children were killed and 868 injured from the beginning of the war on February 24 to December 28. An additional 349 are missing. The use of bombs and artillery shells is particularly dangerous for adolescents – and they stay dangerous for quite some time. Thousands of square kilometers of territory will remain contaminated for several years by mines and unexploded ordnance – and children are likely to be killed or lose limbs in random explosions.
Olena Zelenska, the wife of President Zelenskyy, has become a kind of patron for the children of Ukraine and heads up the aid response in the country."Thousands of Ukrainian children witness death, their lives are threatened, they face danger and fears, and they all unexpectedly become mature," she said at a UNICEF conference in October."But they remain children and are vulnerable. We can’t allow the burden of their experience to ruin their future.
Memories of her father are nevertheless omnipresent."Arina was her father’s girl," says her mother, having inherited Andriy’s delicate lips and dimples. Not a day passes, she says, that she and her daughter don’t cry together about his death. Now, in winter, Arina remembers how he used to marinate the roast chicken, and in summer, she’ll think about how she used to go swimming with him at the seaside."When I couldn’t swim anymore, he would let me grab onto his shoulders.
Traveling through the countryside, one comes across children who have built play-checkpoints. Or, as in early May in Zaporizhzhia, a six-year-old who was wearing his UNICEF backpack on his chest as a bullet-proof vest and spoke constantly of tanks and bombs while imitating the noises of explosions. A wall of the Zaporizhzhia cellar where families seeking shelter from the violence initially slept in bunkbeds following their arrival is covered with children’s drawings.
When things got particularly bad, nine-year-old Lina would hide under her parents’ bed with a pillow over her head."We wouldn’t be able to get her to come out for the whole night," her mother says. Little Danil was just 11 months old when the war reached them."When the explosions would wake him up and he started to scream, I felt so helpless," his mother says.The family is currently surviving on 275 euros of state assistance per month. Often, Zaklinska gets up at 3:30 a.m.
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