“For the first four days, we didn’t know who was alive, and who wasn’t. They didn’t register my son’s name when he was admitted to hospital,” said Oleksandr, a Ukrainian man who has been hospitalized. He and all of his family members including the son Daniil were injured in mortar shelling just outside their home in a residential neighborhood. All three were taken to different hospitals.
In the northern city of Chernihiv, they have been, including the six-year-old Daniil Avdeenko has were brought to the hospital.
When the explosion occurred, all of them were thrown to the ground. His father Oleksandr saw that his wife’s leg was bleeding profusely. He used the strap of her bag as a tourniquet, an act that has saved her leg from being amputated.
Oleksandr had called out to Daniil, who’d told him he was alright. But when the boy began to stand up Oleksandr realized how badly he was hurt.
“I saw that he had shrapnel all over his body, and he was bleeding a lot,” the father said.
Eventually, the family was reunited and brought to Kyiv for treatment.
Daniil had shrapnel pieces in his head which were removed, but the bits lodged in his back are still there. Doctors say it will be too painful to remove them right now. The boy has multiple injuries and fractures in his leg. Till now it’s not clear when he’ll be able to walk.
For the most part, he’s cheerful, but he lets out little cries of pain when a nurse comes to inject the medicine.
“He tells the nurses at the hospital the details of how we were all covered in blood. He remembers it all. But he blames himself. Just before it happened, I’d told him to go down to the basement with his mother. But he insisted on coming outside to me,” says Oleksandr. “I’ve explained to him that he’s not guilty. We all have.”
After the war started, Oleksandr says Daniil would ask lots of questions.
“When there was shooting, he would ask ‘Dad who’s shooting now?’. I’d say ‘ours’. ‘And now?’, he’d ask. I’d tell him ‘It’s our men being attacked,’ In the night, he would see tanks in his dreams. When bombs dropped from the sky, he would wake up frightened. But despite it all, he would still have fun. After the attack though, he’s changed drastically,” says Oleksandr.
Even those who’ve managed to flee physically unscathed, bear scars of psychological trauma.
A generation of children in Ukraine is cut off from a normal childhood at the moment. The UN estimates that around two-thirds of the country’s 7.8 million children have been displaced.
With fighting raging in the south and east and renewed shelling in Lviv and Kyiv, no part of Ukraine appears safe right now.
It’s unclear when the children of this country might be able to return to the life that was suddenly interrupted.