Almost every second that passes, a child in Ukraine becomes a refugee, the UN said on Tuesday, as 3 million people have fled the country since February 24 and the Russian invasion.
In the past 20 days, around 1.4 million children have been forced to flee the country, around 55 every minute or “virtually one child every second”, said James Elder, a spokesman for the UN Fund for Childhood (UNICEF), during a regular UN press briefing in Geneva.
“We have now reached the 3 million mark in terms of population movements out of Ukraine,” said Paul Dillon, spokesperson for the International Organization for Migration at the same briefing.
Less than three weeks after the fighting began “three million lives have been uprooted. Three million women and children and vulnerable people are separated from the people they love,” IOM boss Antonio Vitorino tweeted.
He demanded, like all heads of UN humanitarian agencies, an immediate cessation of hostilities.
“This crisis, in terms of speed and scale, is unprecedented since the Second World War,” added the UNICEF spokesperson.
The spokesperson, also echoing UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, stressed that these children “are at significant risk of separation, violence, sexual exploitation and trafficking”, “like all children who are driven from their homes by war and conflict”.
“They are in desperate need of security, stability and child protection services, especially unaccompanied children or those who have been separated from their families,” said Elder, who returned from displacement. two weeks in the west of the country.
“Each of these children, or almost, has a father who had to explain to him that his father could not leave with him”, he underlined, adding that the children he had been able to see were not crying: “not because they are polite, but because they are traumatized”.
Mr. Elder also described in terrible detail, doctors reduced to sticking colored stickers on injured children presented to them to sort them according to the severity of the injuries.
Green “means injured but we can leave them, yellow a child who needs care, a red sticker for those who need attention immediately”, said the spokesperson.
“And when pediatricians are forced to put a black sticker on a child, it means they’re alive, but they shouldn’t be taken care of, because we don’t have the resources and he will die,” he added.