From Ira Kapitonova in Kyiv (Day 466):
Preserve me, O God, for in you I take refuge.
Psalm 16:1
June 4 is the International Day of Innocent Children Victims of Aggression, established by the UN. In 2021, Ukrainian Parliament voted to establish June 4 as the Remembrance Day for the children who died as a result of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine.
This war started in 2014, and over the first eight years (from April 14, 2014, until the end of 2021), Russian weapons killed 152 children and wounded 146 (according to the official information, the actual numbers may be higher). During the full-scale stage of this war, since February 24, 2022, Russians have killed 485 Ukrainian kids and wounded 1005. The number of victims exceeds the number of days of the full-scale war! The most recent victim is a 2-year-old girl killed last night during a missile strike on the suburbs of the city of Dnipro. And this number will keep increasing until Russia is stopped.
Today, there were many articles and reports about the children whose lives were taken by Russia. The youngest was only 2 days old (because you cannot count the number of unborn children lost to Russian aggression). I vividly remember over a dozen reports about children from Mariupol, Vinnytsia, Odesa, Kharkiv, and Kyiv suburbs. Those stories tear your heart to pieces, and I cannot bring myself to retell them here.
Today, they opened a monument in Kharkiv. It captures two little angels with scorched wings rising to the heavens. The pedestal reads, “To the little angels who had to face human cruelty so early and who will never grow up to be adults.”
Voice of Ukraine 