Daily Times

Kharkiv, Ukraine: A plaster on his eye, eight-year-old Dima Kasyanov lies unconscious on a hospital bed in Ukraine’s second city Kharkiv after a Russian missile blasted through his home.

He was in his family flat when it hit on Monday, sending shrapnel shooting through his upper jaw and into the base of his neck, his doctor Oleksandre Dukhovsky says.

“For two days, we pumped ash out of his stomach. He still has cinders in his lungs,” says the head of the city’s paediatric neurosurgery centre.

“But he is stable. Slowly we are getting there,” says the surgeon, as he emerges from operating on another, a 52-year-old man.

Since Russia invaded its pro-Western neighbour on February 24, at least 78 children have been killed and more than 100 wounded, Ukraine’s ombudswoman Lyudmyla Denisova says.

The UN children’s agency UNICEF has warned the war threatens the lives and well-being of the country’s 7.5 million children.

More than one million children have fled the country, it says, among more than two million Ukrainians who have crossed into next-door countries to safety.

In the eastern city of Kharkiv near the Russian border, a nurse checks Dima’s vitals on a screen near his bed.