Ukraine Mourns Its Lost Children as Russia’s War Toll Mounts

According to a report by the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office, 551 children have been killed as a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

As of June 4, the official tally of injured children stands at 1,919, with Donetsk, Kharkiv, and Kherson among the hardest-hit regions.

Most recently, as a result of a Russian attack on Dnipro, on June 4, two boys were injured, one just a month old, and the other 17 years old.

But the true numbers of lives lost are significantly higher, as gathering information from areas experiencing heavy fighting and those currently under Russian control, such as Mariupol, is difficult and takes time, potentially obscuring the war’s true cost.

Sofiyka’s story

Every Saturday, Olha Holynska travels two and a half hours, from Kyiv to Chernihiv, to visit the site where her 6-year-old daughter, Sofiyka, was killed in a Russian missile strike last August. She brings coffee for herself and a milkshake for Sofiya, a ritual of remembrance.

When the missile struck the Chernihiv Drama Theater, Olha and her daughter were visiting family. Sofiyka was playing on a stage when she was injured. A concrete slab fell, pinning her mother’s leg and trapping the girl. Despite being rushed to the regional children’s hospital, Sofiyka died from her injuries.

“On the day it happened, we didn’t have time to drink coffee together, and she didn’t have time to finish her milkshake. I come here because I want Sofiyka to remember that her mom loves her very much. Now I do everything for her. She lives forever in my memory, in my heart, in my soul,” says her mother, Olha.

The attack, which killed seven people and injured more than 200, is under investigation by Ukrainian authorities.

And Sofiyka’s death is just one among the thousands of children who have tragically lost their lives due to Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.

Abduction and forced assimilation

Beyond the immediate casualties, Russia stands accused of a systematic campaign to kidnap and forcibly relocate Ukrainian children to its territory, severing their ties to their homeland.

According to the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy, about 500,000 adults and children were forcibly deported from the temporarily occupied territories to Russia.

Evidence suggests a deliberate campaign by President Vladimir Putin and his political allies to sever the Ukrainian identity of the war’s most vulnerable victims: children. The New York Times, through a review of Russian social media posts, obtained photos, videos, text messages, and documents, and conducted interviews with over 110 caregivers, legal experts, and Russian and Ukrainian officials.

The investigation traced the lives and movements of children taken into Russian custody. Legal experts warn that what transpired with these children may constitute a war crime.

By spring 2022, the Russian occupation of Kherson served as a blueprint for forcibly assimilating a Ukrainian city and its people. Russia installed a new governing body, and a Russian flag replaced the Ukrainian one at the foster home, where the children were kept.

In May 2022, Putin issued a decree, simplifying the process for Ukrainian caregivers in occupied territories like Kherson to obtain Russian citizenship for orphaned or fostered Ukrainian children, reducing the wait time for granting citizenship to three months compared to the usual five years.

Later, as the Ukrainian forces began a military campaign to liberate Kherson, the children from the foster home were taken by Russian authorities and transferred to Crimea. A few weeks later, the children’s pictures surfaced on a Russian government adoption website, indistinguishable from those of countless other Russian orphans. Their profiles, totaling 22, falsely listed them as Crimean and deliberately erased any trace of their Ukrainian heritage.

Recently, seven of the children from Kherson Children’s Home have returned to Ukraine with the help of Ukrainian authorities and Qatar, but hundreds more remain missing.

The ongoing Russian attacks continue to generate more heart-wrenching stories each day, with the number of children killed, injured, and displaced tragically rising.