By Ludmila Denisova, Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights
As of 10 a.m. on April 26, 2022, according to the Unified Register of Pre-Trial Investigations, as well as other sources that need confirmation, 217 children (+2 per day) have died and 391 children have been injured since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began.
It is impossible to establish the actual number of dead and wounded children due to the fact that the occupying forces are actively fighting in Ukrainian cities.
The most affected were: Donetsk region - 127 children, Kyiv region - 114 children, Kharkiv - 93 children, Chernihiv - 66 children, Kherson - 44 children, Mykolaiv - 43 children, Luhansk - 37 children, Zaporizhia - 27 children, Sumy - 17 children, in the city of Kyiv - 16 children, in Zhytomyr - 15 children.
Yesterday, two children aged 9 and 13 died of their injuries as a result of the shelling of residential buildings in the city of Lyman in the Donetsk region by the russian occupiers.
In the town of Bakhmach in the Chernihiv region, a 15-year-old boy was seriously injured in an explosion of an unknown object in his own house and died in hospital a few hours later.
Such actions by the russian occupation forces are a direct violation of the Hague and Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
I appeal to the UN Commission to Investigate Human Rights Violations during the Russian Military Invasion of Ukraine to take into account these facts of Russia's violations of children's rights in Ukraine. I call on international partners to provide weapons to fight the aggressor country of Russia!