At least 484 children have been killed and 992 injured since the invasion of Ukraine began, the country’s attorney general’s office said on Thursday, as Ukraine marked International Children’s Day.
“The Office of the Attorney General provides procedural guidance in cases of more than 2,900 war-related crimes against children: murder and injury, sexual violence, attacks on children’s institutions and facilities, deportation, forced displacement and abduction,” it said in a statement. .
Ukraine and most other post-communist countries in Eastern Europe mark June 1 as International Children’s Day. Cities, schools, and community groups often organize events geared toward children, such as sports days and fun fairs.
“Children’s Day has to be about safe childhood, summer, life. But today is about new crimes of [Rússia] against Ukrainian children. A 9-year-old girl was killed in a bombing in Kiev, and another is now in hospital,” Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska wrote on social media.
More than 2,500 educational institutions were damaged, including 256 completely destroyed, the Attorney General’s Office said in its statement this Thursday.
It added that more than 19,500 Ukrainian children were forcibly deported to Russia or temporarily occupied territories. “But these are only officially registered cases,” he said, warning that the number could be higher.
In March, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant against President Vladimir Putin and Russian official Maria Lvova-Belova for an alleged scheme to deport Ukrainian children to Russia.
The ICC accusations, which relate to an alleged practice that the CNN and other media reported, were the first to be formally brought against officials in Moscow since it began its unprovoked attack on Ukraine last year.
The presiding judge of the ICC, Piotr Hofmanski, told the CNN in March that all signatory countries are “obliged to execute court-issued arrest warrants”, which means that “there are 123 states – two-thirds of the states in the world – in which he [Putin] they will not be saved.”
The Kremlin labeled the ICC’s actions “outrageous and unacceptable” and said Russia does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction.
Source: CNN Brasil
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