Russia’s war against Ukraine caused the death of 489 children and young people and injured 1,206, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office announced Sunday, on the day the country celebrates Father’s Day.
The most recent cases occurred on Saturday, when a 15-year-old boy and his father were killed by a Russian missile that hit the car they were traveling in in the Kherson region, according to authorities.
In the same region, a 17-year-old boy was injured as a result of a Russian shelling attack on the village of Kozatsk, the Ukrainian news agency UKrinform reported.
A shelling “by the troops of the aggressor state” also injured a 9-year-old girl in Kostyantynivka, in the Donetsk region, on Saturday, the same agency added.
“According to official information from the Minors’ Prosecutor’s Office, 489 children were killed and 1,026 were injured with varying degrees of seriousness,” the Prosecutor’s Office said in a message posted on the Facebook social network.
The numbers are not final and work is underway to verify the situation “in the places of hostility, in the temporarily occupied territories and in the liberated territories,” Ukrinform added.
The information about the course of the war published by the two sides cannot be immediately verified independently.
On the occasion of Father’s Day in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky sent a message on the social network Twitter wishing that all fathers who are at war can return home.
“May our parents live long and healthy lives. And may all the frontline parents come home,” Zelensky wrote on Twitter.
“Thank you to all Ukrainian parents, to all Ukrainian families, for our strong and brave soldiers who defend the independence of Ukraine and fight for the life of Ukraine,” he added.
Zelensky illustrated the message with a video made by United24, a platform he created to collect donations, showing Ukrainian soldiers returning home hugging children.
The number of civilian and military casualties from the war in Ukraine, launched by Russia on February 24, 2022, is unknown, but several sources, including the UN, have admitted that it will be high.
In the most recent bulletin on Ukraine, the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) confirmed the deaths of 8,983 civilians as of June 4 and more than 15,400 wounded.
The UN agency has warned that “the real figures are considerably higher”, given the delay in receiving information and confirming data from places with intense fighting.
Source: TSF
