This story appears on Apple News, taken from the BBC News site. Google it on the BBC site and watch the video if you can. I couldn’t. Anyone who blames the Ukrainians for this cruel war is insane. The attack on Ukraine was completely unprovoked. The Russian forces are now engaged in reducing the city of Mariupol to rubble. 90% of its buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of women and children are buried in the rubble of a theater where they were sheltering. Hundreds more are buried under an arts school. And the world watched in horror.
In his hospital bed, little Artem stares into space. He clutches a small yellow toy tractor but says nothing as specialist nurses monitor his condition. The Russian shell that blasted shrapnel into his belly also badly wounded his parents and grandparents as they tried to flee Mariupol. A victim of Putin’s war and he’s not yet three years old.
In the next bed to Artem lies 15-year-old Masha, also from near Mariupol. Her right leg was amputated after it was torn apart by the blast from a Russian shell last Tuesday.
The very worst of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine and what the relentless Russian bombardment has done to the people trapped in the besieged city of Mariupol, can be seen at the Regional Children’s Hospital in the nearby city of Zaporizhzhia.
Hundreds of people have been evacuated here. Their physical wounds are obvious and may, to an extent, heal. The psychological trauma will live with them for ever.
Doctors here and the children’s surviving relatives, asked us to tell their stories, among them Dr Yuri Borzenko, head of the Children’s Hospital. He can’t hide his contempt for what Russia has done.
“I hate Russia,” says Dr Borzenko, without a flicker of emotion on his face. “The girl who lost her leg (Masha) was so traumatised she wouldn’t eat or drink for days. She couldn’t mentally handle what had happened. We had to feed her intravenously.”
“Another boy,” says the doctor, “a six-year-old, with shrapnel in his skull described – without any tears or emotion – watching his mother burn to death in their car after it was hit. Two days later he said ‘dad buy me a new mum, I need someone to walk me to school’.”
What is happening in Mariupol is a humanitarian disaster, even – perhaps – a war crime. An estimated 90% of the city’s buildings have been damaged or destroyed. After last week’s destruction of a theatre where more than 1,000 people were sheltering, reports today that an arts school, with 400 people inside, has also been attacked.
Those who’ve been able to escape Mariupol talk of unimaginable horrors. First-hand accounts of bodies lying in the streets, of homes destroyed. Carrying those memories they put as much physical distance as they can between themselves and what they went through….
At Zaporizhzhia’s Children’s Hospital, I came across one grief-stricken, inconsolable father whose family had been completely torn apart.
His daughter Natasha, who was 26, and his 4-year-old granddaughter Dominica, were killed when a Russian shell landed near the shelter where the whole family was seeking refugee from the bombardment of Mariupol.
“I looked at the ground and there lay my little granddaughter with her head completely torn to pieces,” says Vladimir. “She lay there without a single breath and right next to her was my daughter with her legs fractured, open fractures.”
Dominica – whose pictures her grandfather almost caresses on his phone – was killed instantly. Her mother died from her injuries the next day.
As broken as he is, Vladimir is trying to stay strong for his second daughter, Diana. She was also critically wounded in the blast and was about to undergo emergency surgery.
But he could not hide his pain. “God, why would you bring all this upon me? I was not supposed to bury my children, my lovely girls, I failed to protect you.”
These atrocities are so awful. Putin is a war criminal and because he is not stopped (just like in Crimea and Syria) this provides him with more power to continue the invasion.
The world cannot sit idle again and let this to go on any longer. The suffering is horrendous and world leaders are being way too slow and way too cautious in the response to Putin. He only understands weaponry because he is a heartless dictator. Nothing else but a united effort from NATO will put an end to the violence. Ukraine should be allowed into NATO immediately.
Absolutely.
But this needs to be a UN force, not a NATO one. The UN General Assembly needs to invoke UN Resolution 377, “Uniting for Peace,” which allows the GA to overrule the Security Council when the SC fails to act to secure the peace because of the veto power of SC member states. Then, it needs to send an overwhelming, international peacekeeping force into Ukraine, including airplanes instructed to close the sky. Russia needs to be warned that it must cease hostilities, or this closing of the sky will necessarily have to include taking out missile batteries on Russian and Belarussian soil.
The tragedy of the matter is that the UN is toothless without the super powers. Putin watched the United States act unilaterality in Iraq, then acted the same way in Syria. We could but stand by and watch as Putin’s Franco, Asad, laid waste to his own country rather than allow freedom of expression. Then came his adventures in his south, all leading up to this invasion.
Syria was the moment we might have done something. The UN, however, does not seem to ever be capable of pushing the dictators out.
We could be, Roy, at a turning point in history in which the way of the strongman is rejected by a united world. Would that that were so. I was so heartened by the overwhelming UNGA vote on the Russian aggression against Ukraine. Time for the UN to grow some teeth.
And it is long past time for the US to become a party to the Rome Statute and to submit itself to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. The US also needs to ratify all nine of the international treaties codifying the UN Declaration of Human Rights into law. That it hasn’t done so is a shame upon our nation.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2009/07/24/united-states-ratification-international-human-rights-treaties#
We must turn a page and be recognized as standing for international law. We are asking this of China right now. We need to put our actions where our mouths are.
The photograph that undid me was one of a woman sitting on the ground her back against the wall. She is holding her child, about 3 or 4 years old. The caption said that her two other children died in an attack.
I just don’t know how you gather yourself and move forward, even with your only child alive and in need of your care. The report said there was no time for burial and that even children’s bodies were buried in a mass grave on the outsirkts of the town.
Heartbreaking
This isn’t the worst. The worst is yet to come. Putin is just getting started. If he isn’t yanked from power, next up, chemical and/or bio-weapons if the Russian military doesn’t start taking territory.
If those don’t work, Putin will order his thugs use tactical nukes on Ukraine. Not city busters, but nukes designed for military battlefields to take out armies, a unit at a time. But these nukes will be used on civilians and military targets.
Putin won’t stop until all of Ukraine is a radioactive wasteland.
Putin either drops dead, is removed from power by other powerful Russians, or NATO sends in its military into Ukraine and Russia to stop him. I don’t think anything else will.
I read a few days ago that Putin is thinking of bringing back Soviet Era cleansing programs to get rid of any Russians that protest what he’s doing.
Lloyd,
Putin is not a madman. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He cannot bear losing face. Nothing will stop him other than a palace coup or greater force. The world is at a terrifying precipice.
“This isn’t the worst. The worst is yet to come.”
Having utterly failed with its planned Blitzkrieg, Russia has now turned to leveling cities. Reuters is reporting that 90 percent of the housing in Mariupol has been destroyed. This is what evil looks like.
What would we do with a person who, in ordinary life, outside the bizarre theatre of war, who did these things to a single child? We would sentence him or her to death or, at a minimum, to life in prison. Putin has committed such evil times thousands. He must no longer be admitted to ordinary interaction with other humans. If he ever steps foot, again, outside Russia, he must be arrested and tried and condemned for the mass murder of children that he is.
murderer
How about mentioning US’ ‘children of war’…Afghanistan, Vietnam, Iraq, etc.etc. etc.? These children don’t count? Why…because their skin isn’t white?
And Whatabout when Jan crashed her bike because she refused to get glasses?…Your trolls are ineffective. Putin is a mass murderer sending Russia back into the Stone Age and nothing you say distracts from or diminishes this fact. .
exactly
Well, Vera, it’s the children of Ukraine who are being killed right now by your leader. Ask him to stop the killing.
The other children are also dying right now Diane. I think Peskyvera raises an important question. Why don’t we care about those other victims as much as we do for the children of Ukraine? Clare Daly posed the same question to the EU parliament. -“There’s no doubt about it, we’re living in times of catastrophic crisis, where the lives of innocent civilians are sacrificed in the wars of their masters. Yes, in Ukraine, but not only. Since the last plenary tens of thousands of Afghani citizens have been forced to flee in search of food and safety. 5 million children face famine, an agonizing and painful death, a 500 percent increase in child marriages and children being sold just so they can survive. And not a mention of it. Not here, not anywhere. No wall-to-wall TV coverage, no emergency humanitarian response, no special plenaries, not even a mention in this plenary. No Afghani delegations and no statements. My God, they must be wondering what makes their humanitarian crisis so unimportant. Is it the color of their skin? Is it that they’re not white? They’re not European? That their problems come from a US gun or US invasion? Is it that the decision to rob their countries wealth was taken by a despotic US president, rather than a Russian one? Because, my God, all wars are evil, and all victims deserve support. And until we get on that page we have no credibility whatsoever.” Feeling compassion and empathy for the sufferings of the people of Ukraine is a good thing, but we need to remind ourselves that other people in other parts of the world are also suffering and that they are equally deserving of our compassion.
In answer to your question, Vera, these children do count, and former US leaders have much to answer for there. But this does not excuse the murder of children currently being carried out by Tsar Vlad.
And that, Vera, is one of the many reasons why we must not allow, here in the United States, the fascist right that Putin has been supporting to seize power in the 2022 midterms and 2024 presidential election. That element in our politics, typified by Putin’s dog, Trump, will never do anything to bring about a national reckoning with regard to these past crimes because they, like Putin, like Trump, are vicious criminals.
Your boss, Vera, is an atavism. Serving him is serving the murderous authoritarian strongman nightmare from which the world is struggling to awaken.
What’s going on in Ukraine is an absolute horror show, every day, every hour. An estimated 10 millions displaced internally or externally from their homes and from their normal lives, the country has been totally upended and the slaughter is far from over. We should definitely keep arming the Ukrainians before the Russians take complete control of the country and its western borders. Putin got away with the bombings and massacres in Syria, he paid no price for his cold blooded assaults against humanity. I wish some brave Russian would put a bullet through his skull, as brave as that woman who protested the war on live Russian TV. The great mass of Russians have no idea what is going on in Ukraine because Putin has control of the media, the Russians see only what Putin allows them to see.
10 million. The mind reels.