The war does not spare Ukrainian children
For many, that has meant sheltering in basements and subway stations as Russian forces attack cities and street fighting rages on. For others it has meant scrambling to escape, leaving homes and fathers, taking trains and buses or walking miles with their families in the hope of crossing over to a safer country.
Some children have been killed or injured in the conflict. A 6-year-old girl in the southern city of Mariupol was hit in a shelling. She was taken to hospital in an ambulance but died as her parents, nurses and doctors cried.
Babies are born into a world of turmoil. At Okhmadet Children’s Hospital in the middle of the capital, tiny newborn twin brothers were swaddled in blankets in the basement. At the other end of the country, in Mariupol, Kateryna Suharokova gave birth to a son, Makar, in the basement of a maternity hospital converted into a medical room and used as a bomb shelter.
Children too young to understand the reasons and the history of the conflict with Russia still saw him coming home. A 3-year-old boy in Kiev stares at the open coffin at the funeral of a Ukrainian soldier.
And at the cancer hospital, young patients in the basement held up signs in English for a visiting photographer: “Stop War.”
Across Ukraine and in refugee shelters across borders, parents are struggling to comfort their children. Mothers rock them on subway platforms or carry them for miles in the cold. They find entertainment for nights spent underground – books, toys, phones, pets. At a border crossing in Poland, refugees were greeted with boxes of donated clothes and toys.