Voice of Ukraine

From Ira Kapitonova in Kyiv (Day 355):

Cast your burden on the Lord,
and he will sustain you;
he will never permit
the righteous to be moved.
Psalm 55:22

I often think about the children who live through this war. Their experiences are different, and they all cope differently, but I keep praying for their hearts not to be scarred by this brutality.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a story (https://fb.watch/iGAcoNpHgR/) about a military medic who left her daughter with her family in the Kharkiv region before the full-scale war. The Russians soon occupied the city, and the woman lost contact with her family. When she tried to find ways to evacuate her daughter to the territory under Ukraine’s control, her family refused to do it as they had pro-Russian views. Instead, when the Ukrainian army liberated the city, they took the girl to Russia. With the help of police and volunteers, the mom was finally reunited with her daughter.

Last week, there was a report about two girls, 15 and 13 years old, who returned to Ukraine after spending almost a year in Russia (https://bit.ly/3K1ezkF). In spring 2022, they lived in the Luhansk region. Their older brother died during a shelling, so their mother decided to move to her relatives in Russia. Their mother was very sick and died of a stroke in December. The girls were immediately sent to an orphanage where they were mistreated because they said they were from Ukraine. Their older sister is old enough to be their guardian and managed to get them back to Ukraine. She said they were lucky they hadn’t been adopted. Otherwise, everything would take much longer.

You can find collections of stories (https://bit.ly/3YIZskt) of children who were forcefully deported to Russia and the occupied territories, sometimes without the consent of their parents. One girl was kidnapped by a local pro-Russian lady who abandoned her at a checkpoint. The kids were often threatened with being sent to the far East and adopted into Russian families. By the way, “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” is part of the crime of genocide, according to the Genocide Convention.

According to the latest reports (https://childrenofwar.gov.ua/en/), since the beginning of the full-scale war, 461 children have died; 922 have been wounded; and over 16207 (the Russian sources claim the number 733 thousand) have been forcefully deported to Russia with only 307 returned so far. And I don’t even know the number of kids who lost their homes, who are seeking refuge elsewhere, who tremble at the sound of airplanes or sirens, who have been orphaned by this cruel war…

I think about the children of war every time I look at my 8-year-old son, whenever we sit down to our homeschool lessons (the option we chose instead of returning to Kyiv), every time he talks about the friends and things he misses, every time he prays for all of his classmates to be safe and for all of them to be reunited in their school. No child deserves to know what war is, but I know that the Lord will restore justice, and He will wipe away the tears of Ukrainian children.

Please, keep praying for Bakhmut. Starting this week, passage into the city is restricted (only journalists and civilians with special army permits can enter the town). It may mean that a serious military operation is underway. The fighting for the city may intensify even more (if it is even possible) as the Russians desperately want to establish their control there in honor of the -year anniversary of the invasion. May God have mercy on our defenders and civilians.