Death of 15-year-old girl in shelling in Donbas highlights child death toll in Russia’s war on Ukraine

Daria Kazemirova, a 15-year-old resident of Zalizne, a Ukrainian government-controlled town in the war-torn part of Donetsk Oblast, some 700 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, was killed on May 28 when a shell exploded in the yard of her house.

Kazemirova was in the yard at 12.30 p.m. when forces in the Russian-occupied part of Donetsk launched a shelling attack on Ukrainian-held frontline areas.

A shell landed three meters away from her, the press service of Donetsk Oblast National Police wrote on its website on May 28. Daria was severely wounded by shell fragments, and had no chance of survival, the police said.

“The war in the Donbas is not over,” Vyacheslav Abroskin, the head of Donetsk Oblast National Police department wrote on Facebook on May 28. “Every day thousands of Ukrainian citizens from Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts are suffering from it. Children are dying in this war.”

Police have categorized the incident as a terrorist attack.

Only six days earlier, on May 22, another tragic incident involving child casualties occurred in the Russian-controlled city Debaltseve, in the war-torn part of Donetsk Oblast. A 14-year-old boy died and another two boys and a girl were wounded in an explosion on a bus, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission in the Donbas reported on its website. The explosion was caused by a grenade that was in the possession of one of the children, according to media reports.

One of the grandmothers of one of the injured boys told the SMM that her 15-year-old grandson had serious wounds in elbow and thigh and was taken to a hospital in a hospital in Yenakiieve, a Russian- controlled city, some 41 kilometers northwest of Donetsk.

Witnesses of the tragedy told the OSCE that the explosion occurred in the bus while it was driving in the city, filling the vehicle with a lot of smoke.

A total of 95 boys and 48 girls have died since the start of the war in the Donbas, with another 80 children being killed when Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down by a missile launched by a unit of Russia’s 53^rd Anti-aircraft Missile Brigade. Overall, 223 children have been killed during the war in eastern Ukraine, Iryna Yakovlieva, the human rights officer of the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, told the Kyiv Post on May 29.

Russia’s war in the Donbas has killed more than 10,300 people since the Kremlin launched its military intervention in the region in 2014.

More than 2,500 civilian men, women, and children have been killed, and over 9,000 injured since 2014, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs or OCHA reported in April. Explosive hazard contamination in eastern Ukraine impacts 1.9 million people, including around 200,000 children.

As the war in the Donbas enters its fifth year, UNICEF has reported that more than 500,000 children are in need of immediate humanitarian assistance.

Daily ceasefire violations have left more than 200,000 children and their families at risk of death and injury, UNICEF has reported.

Over 600,000 people, including 100,000 children, are bearing the brunt of the continued armed clashes along the 457-km front line in war-torn Donbas, the OCHA has reported.