A group of 19 children, most of them orphans, are "in great danger" trapped in a sanatorium in Mariupol, a Ukrainian city besieged by Russian forces, their relatives and eyewitnesses told Agence France-Presse today.
Children and teenagers, aged 4 to 17, were sent to this children's clinic specialising in treating lung diseases before the Russian offensive began on February 24.
They are now "at great risk", as their guardians have not been able to get them back because of the fighting in this city that has been bombed for several weeks, an eyewitness, Alexei Voloschuk, told Agence France-Presse.
He took refuge inside the sanatorium, before being forced to leave the besieged city, which suffers from a lack of water, gas and electricity and where almost all communications are cut off.
When he arrived in Zaporizhzhya on Friday, Voloschuk said the children were living in freezing basements and had not been washed for more than two weeks as Russian missiles fell near the clinic in recent days.
"There is no heating, it's cold. One of the little girls, aged about eight, showed me a wound on her face caused by the cold."
He said a "heroic" pulmonologist, a cook and two nurses are looking after the children while local police take their food, cooked outside, to a fire near the sanatorium building. But the food can run out quickly and there can be a shortage, he said.
One of the guardians, Olga Lopatkina, director with her husband of a private orphanage in Ugledar, 100 km north of Mariupol, told Agence France-Presse that in January she sent six of her children, aged 6 to 17, to the sanatorium.
After the Russian offensive began, she left her town with the rest of her children to reach Lviv, in western Ukraine, then Hungary before finally arriving in France. She is desperately trying to get the children left behind in Mariupol to join her.
But residents can only leave the city in their own cars. In Geneva, the Stop TB charity says it is "terribly concerned" about these children.
The foundation fighting TB would like the children to be accepted in other countries, but "the biggest problem is to get them out of there," its executive director Lucika Ditiu explains to AFP, saying she is "in despair."
"They are orphans... the most vulnerable," she sighs. With a thought for the four adults who are trapped with them, she adds that "I dare not imagine what it must be like to be trapped with 19 children in a basement with no water or food."
Source: Proto Thema
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