A schoolgirl has been shot dead in Kyiv – bringing the number of children killed in Russia’s invasion to at least 16, according to Ukraine’s president.
Polina, believed to have been nine or ten years old, was in her final year of primary school.
She and her parents are said to have died when Russian saboteurs opened fire on their family car.
Her sister is in intensive care and her brother is being treated at a children’s hospital after the attack in the northwest of the capital, the city’s deputy mayor Volodymyr Bondarenko said.
Five days into the invasion, Ukraine says that as well as the deaths, another 45 children have been wounded.
On Sunday, the country’s health ministry said at least 352 civilians have died. It is difficult to give exact figures, and it is believed many more have been killed or wounded. Millions of people have fled their homes.
This morning, dozens of civilians were killed and hundreds more injured in Russian rocket strikes on the eastern city of Kharkiv, Ukrainian officials said.
On Friday, a seven-year-old girl was killed in an attack on a pre-school. Alisa Hlans was among six people who died while taking shelter in the nursery in the town of Okhtyrka, northeastern Ukraine.
Amnesty International said the Russian military used widely-banned cluster munitions in the attack.
“It is stomach turning,” Amnesty’s Secretary General Agnès Callamard said. “This should be investigated as a war crime.”
In the southeastern city of Mariupol, doctors were filmed desperately trying to revive a six-year-old girl wounded in Russian shelling.
She was brought to hospital in bloodied unicorn-patterned pyjamas. A medic pumping oxygen looked directly into a video camera.
“Show this to Putin,” he said. “The eyes of this child, and crying doctors.”
Their attempt to resuscitate the girl failed.
According to Amnesty, Russia has been launching indiscriminate attacks on civilian areas, including strikes on hospitals.
The human rights organisation said Russia has violated international humanitarian law and may have committed war crimes in its invasion of Ukraine showing “a blatant disregard for civilian lives”.
