Forgotten and disabled children amid horror of war
A‘Spending 36-40 hours near the Polish border with my kids is impossible. The smallest is seven days old’
nna had long been hoping for good news from the local children’s home where she was planning to adopt, but when a phone call came last week it was more desperate and more immediate than she might have expected.
The director called, not with a query about her application, or a question about her paperwork, but with a frantic query. Could she take two of the children immediately?
The institution for vulnerable children in the eastern Ukrainian region of Kharkiv was worried it could no longer protect or feed the children as Russian troops approached.
“The director asked me to pick up two children,” she told The Telegraph. “She was afraid they would starve to death. They were stuck in the basement with no electricity or heat, and the staff could not evacuate them or get them food.”
Anna said she had paid a taxi driver many times the normal fare to drive her to the children’s home despite shelling, and she was now babysitting the children in her house.
As the Russian advance has smashed across Ukraine, shelling and bombarding towns and their schools and hospitals, administrators are attempting to evacuate or relocate thousands of vulnerable children in the country’s extensive network of orphanages and children’s homes.
The threat was underlined again yesterday when Russian forces struck a psychiatric hospital housing hundreds of patients, according to Ukrainian officials, in the latest attack by Vladimir Putin’s forces on a health institution.
The strike at Izyum, near Kharkiv, followed the bombardment of a maternity hospital earlier this week, which killed three in the southern city of Mariupol.
Some 360 staff and patients, many unable to walk, were hiding in the bomb shelter at the Oskilsky psychoneurological boarding school during yesterday’s attack, the local governor said. The five-storey building took a direct hit, destroying two floors and setting the building alight. No one was killed or injured.
Oleh Synegubov, governor of the region, described the bombardment as “a war crime against civilians” and repeated allegations that Russian forces were carrying out genocide in Ukraine.
The nearby eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv is under relentless bombardment as Russian forces attempt to break resistance, which has held them back for a fortnight.
“As of today, 48 [of the city’s] schools
‘A lot of countries from all over the world have called us and said, please, we want to adopt these children. It’s a huge risk of human trafficking’
have been destroyed,” said mayor Ihor Terekhov, yesterday.
The war has left many of Ukraine’s orphanages and children’s homes under similar threat.
At least 50 children’s institutions are either in territory seized by Russian forces, or are in imminent danger because of their position on the front lines, Mykola Kuleba, the country’s former commissioner on child rights told The Telegraph last week. That figure is expected to rise as the fighting spreads.
Ukraine has one of the highest proportions of young people in children’s homes or orphanages in Europe. Before the war, an estimated 100,000 children were in the country’s network of 700 homes. Only around one in five are orphans, with the rest separated from their families due to poverty, drugs, alcoholism or ill health.
When war broke out, some institutions were emptied, but other children whose families cannot be found, or cannot be moved, are often still trapped.
Lumos, the UK children’s charity founded by the author J K Rowling, has launched an emergency fundraising appeal to try to provide food, hygiene, medicine kits and evacuations to the most vulnerable.
At the City Special Home for Children in Odesa, Valentina Kartashova, the director, must decide what to do with nearly
100 disabled and sometimes terminally ill children. While the closest front is still nearly 100 miles away, Ukraine’s president has warned Odesa is at risk of imminent bombardment.
The home has had many offers from abroad to help evacuate, but Ms Kartashova said the proposals frequently appeared half-baked and inadequate.
Her children need extensive care and they are currently better off in their well-equipped hospital tended to by an army of volunteers, she said.
She told The Telegraph: “Most of the charities say: ‘Come to the border and we’ll sort it out’.
“This kind of offer I don’t like. Spending 36-40 hours near the Polish border, or any other country with my kids is impossible.
“The smallest girl I have now is seven days old. Ten kids are less than one month old.
“So I prefer to stay. It’s safe so far here. We have a bomb shelter 300 metres square. We have beds, food, and alternative power generators.”
Like many in Russian-speaking Odesa, she also cannot imagine facing an assault.
“We have lived with Russians for so many years here in Odesa. Maybe I’m silly and not properly informed, but I don’t feel the threat just yet,” she said.
The rushed evacuation of vulnerable children abroad also potentially leave them vulnerable to human traffickers, warned Mr Kuleba.
He said: “A lot of countries from all over the world have called us and said, please, we want to adopt these children. It’s a huge risk of human trafficking.
“There are not any official procedures to check who they are, and we are very afraid that we are saving children from combat zones and Russian aggression, but on the other hand, these children could be kidnapped.”