The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has talked about the rate Ukrainian children are compelled to flee their war-torn country, with 55 of them becoming refugees every minute.
In a recent statement issued on its website, UNICEF said the “grim figures are a reflection of the growing humanitarian toll from the conflict that’s approaching its third week, since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24” and added that so far, about 75,000 children have been fleeing the country every day.
The agency also said since Russia invaded Ukraine, over 1.5 million children have fled their homes and some have separated from their parents and families.
In a statement, the spokesperson of UNICEF, James Elder, said: “This refugee crisis is in terms of speed and scale, unprecedented since the Second World War, and is showing no signs of slowing down.
“Like all children driven from their homes by war and conflict, Ukrainian children arriving in neighbouring countries are at significant risk of family separation, violence, sexual exploitation, and trafficking.”
Elder added that he had only spent two weeks in the western Ukraine city of Lviv where paediatricians received 60 children overnight from the besieged capital city, Kyiv.
He said paediatricians explained to him that they would use stickers to show the treatment level needed with a “green signifying a child could be left alone for now, yellow for those needing more immediate medical assistance, red for critical and black for those who couldn’t be saved.”
Elder added that “so long as this war continues, the situation for Ukraine’s children will only get worse.”
