Three Ukrainian children stole the show from their mother and CNN’s Anderson Cooper during a live interview from a bomb shelter in the capital Kyiv.
Speaking from their bunker, Olena Gnes said her children were “full of energy and they don’t know where to give this energy”, amid a 35 hour curfew for citizens of Kyiv.
“Especially when we are asking them all the time to be quiet,” said Ms Gnes.. “We are in a closed room without any sunlight and yeah for children its really really hard”.
Her children, who she said were aged aged four months, five and seven, jumped around and pulled faces at the camera and CNN’s viewers.
One of the children also growled in imitation of a tiger, or crocodile, causing Mr Cooper to burst out laughing.
“I love these kids,” one Twitter user wrote on Thursday after watching the interview. “They made me smile today. May they be safe”.
Another said: “This is the best interview I have ever seen!!! I love the way Anderson Cooper looks and smiles and plays with the kids. This family, you can not help but adore!”
Ms Gnes, who mentioned the Russian attack on a theatre in Mariupol that was sheltering children on Wednesday, described “today as the hardest day for me, personally”.
“My heart is just really bleeding after reading this news and I really feel like my sisters and my brothers, my children, are being killed in Mariupol and other places,” said Ms Gnes.
She added that while her children were young, they were aware of what adults were talking about in the bomb shelter and that “they feel how stressed we are as adults and they are stressed, but they are coping very well”.
She added: “They’re asking all the time about Vladimir Putin. Why is he such a bad person? Why is he destroying Ukraine? Why is he killing people?”
It was not the first time Mr Cooper has interviewed Ms Gnes and her family, who have appeared on CNN multiple times since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February.
It remains unclear exactly how many civilians have been killed in the war so far, although Mariupol’s mayor said no Wednesday that somewhere between 1,000 and 1,200 people were seeking shelter in the theatre that was destroyed.
