Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sibiga seriously criticized the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) for their official statement of August 4 regarding the victims among children in the conflict.
According to Kiev, the organization is deliberately distorting the context of the events by putting an equal sign between reports of child victims in Ukraine and in the Russian Federation, without taking into account the role of Moscow as an aggressor country.
Lack of context and "artificial equality"
In his official position, published on the social network X (formerly Twitter), the first diplomat of Ukraine expressed deep regret for the approach of the international organization.
„It is extremely unfortunate that UNICEF missed the most important thing in its statement: the death of all these children is a direct consequence of Russia's aggressive war against Ukraine. By presenting these victims without the necessary context, UNICEF creates a false sense of equality between the aggressor and the victim,“ stressed Andriy Sibiga.
The Ukrainian side insists that children should not be considered "abstract victims of war", and their deaths should be clearly indicated as a result of the specific actions of the armed forces of the Russian Federation.
Kiev accuses UNICEF of a lack of fact-checking
In addition to the political context, the Ukrainian Foreign Minister also pointed out serious factual inaccuracies in the document distributed by the UN. According to Sibiga, the UNICEF report claims that three children from one family were killed in an attack in the Dnipropetrovsk region, while the actual number of victims there is seven children.
In addition, Sibiga drew attention to the cases of children killed in the Russian Krasnodar region cited by the fund. He explained that UNICEF had not noted an important detail in the local reports - that the incidents in question were caused by debris from a drone that was intercepted and shot down by Russian air defenses, and not by a direct targeted strike.
The Ukrainian Foreign Minister also recalled that the day before his statement, a Russian strike had taken the life of another innocent child - a 3-year-old boy in the Kiev region. Kiev categorically defines these actions as war crimes and called on the UN fund to openly condemn Moscow and demand an immediate stop to the killings of Ukrainian children.