At least 42 children have been killed and 109 injured by land mines and unexploded ordnance in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine since March last year, according to the latest report by the United Nations Children’s Fund.
Experts warn that these figures may not reflect the actual number of child casualties, as it would be higher if the statistics from the areas, controlled by Russian-backed separatists, is included.
“Lack of access to these areas is a real challenge for humanitarian actors on the ground,” Marie-Pierre Poirier, UNICEF Regional Director for Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of the Independent States was quoted as saying in the report released on March 31.
According to the report, children are a high risk group, as the land mines may be brightly colored and small enough to pick up or kick around.
“Children could be drawn to such items, mistaking them for toys or objects of value, which can result in tragedy,” the report says.
Anton Shevchenko, a national project officer in Ukraine for Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, told the Kyiv Post that it’s really difficult to increase people’s awareness in the war zone, as the conflict is still active.
He says that according to the previous international experience in cleaning up the consequences of the armed conflicts, one year of war takes approximately five years of de-mining effort.
The State Emergency Service of Ukraine has already located and removed more than 33,717 items of ordnance in government-controlled territories. Yet displaced families, who return to communities formerly under conflict, are still at great risk, the UNICEF report says.
To warn children and their parents in Ukraine’s east, UNICEF and its partners have launched a mine-risk education campaign, which includes risk educational messages in print, video and digital formats as well as the training of 100 teachers and school psychologists on mine-risk awareness.
Anna Sukhodolska, who oversees this initiative, told the Kyiv Post that the educational part of the project would start by autumn.
She says the research has already been launched in the affected areas – UNICEF personnel is interviewing children in Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts, and the awareness trainings will be designed based on the results of the research.
Andrii Dziubenko, the OSCE national program coordinator in Ukraine, says the organization has been working with the issue since 2006. It helped the State Emergency Service of Ukraine to run awareness-raising classes on the risks and threats of unsafe military ammunition, left on Ukrainian grounds after Soviet times.
“In August 2014 when the scale of problem of explosive remnants of war became evident for the East of Ukraine, we cut a documentary to produce a public service announcement for general audience” to run as a social ad. A cartoon was also designed specially for the younger audience,” Dziubenko says. “Recent data shows (this information is more) necessary as ever.”
At least 5 million people in Ukraine are affected by the ongoing crisis, including 1.7 million children, while more than 1.1 million people have been internally displaced in-country because of violence.
