Ukrainian Minister Sharply Criticizes UNICEF
Acting Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha accuses the UN children's agency of lacking context and providing incorrect data in its report on children killed in the war.
Acting Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha accuses the UN children's agency of lacking context and providing incorrect data in its report on children killed in the war.
Ukraine's acting Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha sharply criticized the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) on Saturday over its reporting on child casualties in the war between Russia and Ukraine. In a post on social media platform X, Sybiha said that UNICEF's August 4 report failed to highlight key context, thereby creating a "false equivalence between the aggressor and the victim."
Sybiha emphasized that it is "deeply regrettable" that UNICEF, in its statement, failed to point out that all child deaths are a direct result of Russian aggression against Ukraine. "By presenting these victims without that crucial context, UNICEF creates a false equivalence between the aggressor and the victim," the Ukrainian top diplomat wrote.
Furthermore, the minister also accused UNICEF of lacking basic fact-checking. As an example, he noted that the report did not mention that the casualties in Russia's Krasnodar region were caused by a drone that, according to available information, was intercepted by Russian air defense.
He specifically pointed to inaccurate data on casualties in Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk region. According to Sybiha, seven children from one family were killed in that region, not three as UNICEF stated. "Yesterday, Russia killed another innocent Ukrainian child, a three-year-old boy in the Kyiv region," Sybiha added, criticizing UNICEF for its lack of context in reporting.
The Ukrainian minister's criticism comes amid an escalation of attacks deep inside Russian territory. Just a day after his statement, on Sunday, August 10, Ukrainian drones carried out a massive attack on the city of Nizhnekamsk in the Russian republic of Tatarstan, killing at least 13 people and injuring 39, according to the latest information. Mayor Radmir Belyaev confirmed that a child was among the dead. A day of mourning was declared in Tatarstan due to the tragedy.
Nizhnekamsk, home to the large TANECO refinery owned by Tatneft, lies more than 960 kilometers inside Russian territory. Ukraine had already attacked the same refinery in early June. The Russian Defense Ministry reported that it shot down as many as 285 Ukrainian drones within 12 hours, including five over Moscow. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin confirmed that air defense destroyed the drones heading toward the capital. Attacks were also recorded in Bashkortostan, a region between the Volga River and the Urals.
These attacks are part of a broader pattern in which Ukraine has used long-range drones in recent months to strike targets deeper inside Russia. In early July, Russia's largest oil refinery in Omsk, more than 2,500 kilometers from the Ukrainian border, was hit and subsequently halted operations. Meanwhile, in an attack last Friday, a humanitarian warehouse of the World Health Organization (WHO) in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro was destroyed, from which 130 pallets of medical supplies had been evacuated shortly before. WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus responded by saying that "even wars have rules" and that "health care must be protected."
