Ukraine says 203 children are missing in conflict zones

Children walk on the streets of downtown Mariupol, Ukraine, in May.| Photo: EFE/EPA/ALESSANDRO GUERRA

The authorities of Ukraine are looking for 67 missing children, the majority lost in conflict zones, announced this Monday () Deputy Interior Minister Katerina Pavlichenko.

Since the beginning of the war, in February, 4.242 children were registered as missing, but the authorities managed to find 4.19, Pavlichenko added.

The deputy minister provided this data on the occasion of the presentation of the website “Children of War”, with which the Ukrainian authorities want to create a single platform for all institutions involved in the search for children and their families.

“It contains all the necessary information, where to go and how to act when a child goes missing and there is no contact “, she said.

The site’s coordinator, Daria Gerasimchuk, said that many children who disappeared in the conflict were sent to Russia or to territories controlled by pro-Moscow separatists.

The information published on the portal “is a clear testimony to the genocide of Ukrainian children and crimes against humanity that the Russian army commits every day against the Ukrainian people”, she told the “Ukrainska Pravda” newspaper.

During the war, children were killed, 380 were injured and at least 5.600 were sent to territories controlled by the la Russia along with their families, according to Gerasimchuk.