UKRAINE: At least 85 children have died and nearly 100 have been wounded in the fighting in Ukraine, the office of Ukraine’s attorney-general said in a statement on Sunday, citing data from the country’s juvenile prosecutors.
The figure is higher than that provided by the United Nations human rights body, which reported on Saturday that 42 children had died. The United Nations has acknowledged that its tallies are probably an undercount.
Ukraine’s Attorney-General’s Office said that among those killed was a young football player who was in a car attempting to evacuate with other civilians on Friday when Russian artillery struck the vehicle.
The statement adds to other accounts of children who were killed as they tried to flee the violence, including a nine-year-old and an 18-year-old who died last week as they ran across a damaged bridge in the town of Irpin, trying to evacuate to Kyiv.
Meanwhile, Brent Renaud, an award-winning American filmmaker and journalist, was killed in Ukraine on Sunday while reporting in a suburb of the capital, Kyiv, according to Ukraine’s interior ministry.
Renaud, 50, had worked for a number of American news and media organisations in the past, including HBO, NBC and The New York Times. The Ukrainian authorities said he was killed in Irpin, a suburb that has been the site of intense shelling by Russian forces in recent days, but the details of his death were not immediately clear. Ukrainian officials said another journalist was wounded as well.
– THE TELEGRAPH INDIA