A man holds a child as he flees the city of Irpin
(Picture: AFP via Getty Images)Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky warned Vladimir Putin on Wednesday that he will never be forgiven for the killing of children as at least 52 were feared to have died in the first 13 days of the invasion.
The full horror of the conflict was increasingly glaring for the world to see as more and more young lives were being destroyed by Mr Putin’s “barbaric” military action.
As the civilian death toll rises amid the “indiscriminate” shelling, Mr Zelensky said: “We will not allow anyone in the world to ignore the suffering and murder of our people, our children.
“When I spoke to the British Parliament (yesterday afternoon), the scariest number was 50.
“Fifty Ukrainian children killed in 13 days of war. And in an hour it was 52. Fifty-two children. I will never forgive that. And I know that you will never forgive the invaders.”
Just hours later, a Russian airstrike on Sumy, a city in north-eastern Ukraine, was reported to have killed one of Ukraine’s most talented young martial arts fighters. Artyom Priymenko, 16, and his family were said to have died when bombs hit a residential area.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians are believed to have already been killed in Ukraine, including maths prodigy Yulia Zdanovska, 21, reportedly killed by Russian shelling in the eastern city of Kharkiv.
Tom Tugendhat, Conservative chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee, tweeted: “The cost of this war is incalculable. Lives. Families. Our shared future knowledge. All this is being sacrificed to the ego and ambition of a dictator.”
As more footage and reports of atrocities were coming out of Ukraine, the military death toll was also rising. US intelligence chiefs believe between 2,000 and 4,000 Russian troops may have been killed, as well as many Ukrainian soldiers.
In key developments on Wednesday:
* Air raid sirens blared over Kyiv this morning as Ukrainian forces were bolstering defences against the threat from a 40-mile column of Russian tanks and other military vehicles some 18 miles to the north of the city centre.
* Ukrainian deputy prime minister Iryna Vereshchuk said Russian authorities had confirmed a new ceasefire along evacuation corridors out of Sumy, Mariupol, Enerhodar in the south, Volnovakha in the southeast, Izyum in the east, and several towns in Kyiv region.
All the corridors lead to sites elsewhere in Ukraine that are currently held by the Ukrainian government; previous Russian proposals to establish evacuation routes into Russia or ally Belarus were widely criticised.
The route out of Sumy, on the Russian border, is the only one that has been used successfully so far, allowing for the evacuation of 5,000 people, including 1,700 foreign students, yesterday south-west to the city of Poltava.
* British defence chiefs said on Wednesday that Mr Putin’s forces had failed to make any “significant breakthroughs” in their advance on Kyiv. They also highlighted the success of Ukrainian air defences.
* The military setbacks for the Kremlin came as Britain and the US both announced on Tuesday that Russian oil imports would be banned or phased out over the next year.
* US president Joe Biden said Russian forces would not be able to successfully occupy the country of 44 million the size of France and Germany together. He tweeted: “This much is already clear: Ukraine will never be a victory for Putin. Putin may be able to take a city — but he will never be able to hold the country.”
* Any supply of fighter jets to Ukraine must be done through Nato, senior Polish officials said, after Washington appeared to have rejected Warsaw’s offer to fly its 28 MiG-29 jets to a US airbase in Germany with a view to them being supplied to Kyiv.
* Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov was due to travel to Turkey on Wednesday for talks with his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba.
* Russia demanded the United States explain why it was supporting what Moscow cast as a military biological programme in Ukraine, raising fears that the Kremlin is seeking an excuse to launch a broader war against Nato.
Among the fatalities of the war so far was Sofia Fedko, six, who was killed with four other family members on the first day of the invasion in southern Ukraine.
Many more children have also been severely injured by flying shrapnel, glass and other projectiles.
In the besieged eastern city of Kharkiv, a doctor leaned over a boy lying on a bed in a children’s hospital and asked: “Little Vova, how are you?”
“I am fine,” came the barely audible reply. “Fine,” the doctor repeated loudly, satisfied by what he heard.
Medics said Vova was hit in the head by a bullet during fighting in the first few days of the invasion, one of several children brought into the hospital to be treated for shrapnel and bullet wounds.
Kharkiv has seen some of the heaviest fighting, with reports this morning that Ukrainian forces had pushed back a Russian advance. A Ukrainian regional police official said yesterday that 170 civilians had been killed across Kharkiv region, including five children.
At the paediatric neurosurgery centre of the city’s main A&E hospital, eight-year-old Dima Kasyanov lay unconscious on an intravenous drip with a tube coming out of his mouth. His father, Sergiy, showed an X-ray image on his mobile phone that he said was of a piece of shrapnel from an incoming shell that had lodged at the base of Dima’s skull.
“The shrapnel entered through the jaw and lodged itself in the neck, at the top of the vertebral column. It was yesterday. He is eight,” he told Reuters.
The child’s mother sobbed quietly next to him.
