Thirty-one children have returned to Ukraine after being illegally taken to Russia from territories occupied by Moscow, theNGO Save Ukraine. According to kyiv, nearly 19,500 children have been taken away by Moscow since the start of the war, in what it condemns as illegal deportations. On the same day, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine announced on Telegram that more than 1,413 children have been killed or injured in Ukraine since the start of the war.
Return of 31 Ukrainian children illegally taken to Russia
Thirty-one children have returned to Ukraine after being illegally taken to Russia, the NGO Save Ukraine announced on social media on Saturday. “Today, we welcome 31 more children to their homes who were illegally taken by Russians from occupied territories,” wrote Mykola Kuleba, an official of the NGO. These children had been taken to Russia from the regions of Kharkiv (north-eastern Ukraine) and Kherson (south) detailed the association, whose main mission is to fight what it describes as “deportations” of Ukrainian children.
According to the NGO, the children carrying suitcases and bags crossed the border on foot on Friday, with relatives, then boarded a bus to continue their journey. Mykola Kuleba hailed the “heroic mothers” who came to pick up their children and said it was the “most difficult” mission the NGO has had to carry out so far.
Ukrainians commemorate bombing of Kramatorsk railway station
Residents of Kramatorsk laid flowers on Saturday at a memorial at the Donbas city’s central train station where a Russian missile strike killed 61 a year ago, as thousands of civilians rushed there to flee the war in Ukraine. On April 8, 2022, the bombardment had also injured more than 160 among the crowd who had gathered in this station to be evacuated, one of the deadliest attacks having targeted civilians fleeing the advance of the Russian forces.
“My close friend, her daughter and their dog are dead. What more can one say,” Tetiana Syshchenko, 67, told AFP in tears. She herself was nearly killed in the bombardment. Some 4,000 civilians had massed a year ago in this railway junction to be evacuated by train when the station was hit by a Tochka-U missile which, according to experts, was carrying cluster munitions.
The Ukrainian conflict on the menu of Lula’s trip to China
Brazilian President Lula travels to China on Tuesday, after a postponement due to pneumonia, to show that his country can once again play a leading role on the international scene, including on the conflict in Ukraine. This official visit by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to Brazil’s top trading partner should have taken place from March 25 to 31, but doctors recommended that he postpone it due to “mild pneumonia” from which he is now cured .
Lula, 77, is to meet next Friday with his counterpart Xi Jinping, in particular to “exchange their points of view on the war in Ukraine”, Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira told AFP and d other international news agencies. On Thursday, the Brazilian president once again made ambiguous remarks about this conflict.
Two dead in Russian strike on Zaporizhia
A 50-year-old man and his 11-year-old daughter were killed after Russian forces struck a residential building in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhia on Sunday morning, authorities said. Ukraine’s state emergency service also reported that a 46-year-old woman, whom it described as the wife and mother of the victims, was pulled from the wreckage. City Council Secretary Anatoliy Kurtev said two missiles destroyed one building and damaged dozens more in the night strike.
He wrote on the Telegram messaging app: “Cursed Russian terrorists have again attacked Zaporizhia and lost human lives.” The strike was the latest in a string of recent attacks on civilian targets in the region as the full-scale invasion of Moscow enters its second year.