Two kids home alone, a four-year-old and his teenage brother, a week under heavy shelling in their house in Rubizhne, Luhansk Oblast.
Jason, the older one, and Mykhaylo stayed at home to “hold their ground,” since their mother had told them to not abandon the house. She left and never came back, her cell silent. The kids tried to cook themselves, and sometimes their neighbors brought them some food too.
In a week, when Jason ventured out, he ran across Ukrainian soldiers who suggested that they would take the brothers to a safer place: if your house collapses, nobody will pull you out. Jason decided that taking care of his and his brother’s lives would be wiser than guarding the house, and the kids were evacuated to a hospital in Severodonetsk, one of few institutions still operating at the time there.
Now Mykhaylo and Jason stay with their relatives in Poltava. After everything that happened to them, after losing their mom and home, after they were uprooted from where they had been born and brought up, one can hardly call it a happy end. But they have survived, are not injured, and remain Ukrainians.
According to Ukraine’s Office of Prosecutor General, 689 Ukrainian children are officially confirmed to be victims of Russia’s full-scale aggression as of June 1, International Children’s Day, including 243 dead and 446 wounded. The bombardments and shelling of Ukrainian cities and villages by the Russian barbarians have damaged 1937 schools and preschools, of which 181 are ruined completely. Millions of children have become internally displaced persons or refugees abroad.
And the Kremlin also forces Russian citizenship on orphans, that is children whose parents were killed by the Russian orcs, in its attempts to eradicate Ukraine as a nation. Russia must be held accountable!
