Ukraine war: The children suffering as bombs drop on schools, nurseries and hospitals
- At least 103 children have died in the conflict, Ukrainian officials said, and while many have fled the country, millions have stayed
- Children face an ‘immediate and growing threat’ from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, said the UN Children’s Fund UNICEF
Fourteen-year-old Anna-Maria Romanchuk’s lip trembles after a Russian missile exploded outside Gymnasia No34 Lybid, her school in Kyiv. “Scary,” Anna-Maria says in halting English, her face pale with shock as her mother Oksana comforts her. “I just hope that everything will be OK.”
A body lies under a sheet, near a huge crater where the blast ripped through a square between the school, a nursery and several Soviet-era blocks of flats.
The force of the blast blew out every single one of the windows in the school, known as one of the best in the Ukrainian capital’s northwestern Podilsky district.
Locals say the school was being used as a bomb shelter for civilians, and cannot understand how it could be a target for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces.
“Our principal wrote us and asked us to come and help clean up the glass,” says Tetiana Tereshchenko, 41, as she sweeps up with a broom.
Her daughter, who is also 14, is crying, she says. “We were hoping we would go back to school. We had distance learning, now we do not know.”
Kyiv’s mayor Vitali Klitschko said one person was killed in Friday’s attack and 19 injured, including four children.