“We’re sitting here in the basement, we’ve been crying,” Yuliya says. “It’s terrifying to see smoke and shelling. We’re doing everything we can to save our children.”
It took Yuliya two days traveling on foot from her home outside Kyiv before she reached the safety of this health centre. There were moments when she thought she might not make it here at all amid the shelling and explosions that have rocked the area.
“I had to travel across fields and through forests,” she says, adding that due to certain health issues, not every facility would have been able to help her safely deliver her child. “But thanks to God and the doctors, I now have a baby – and I’m alive.”
Since the start of the war, there have been 100 attacks on health facilities in Ukraine, according to the
WHO. Facilities have been damaged or destroyed. Children have been injured or lost their lives.
UNICEF is doing everything it can to respond to the urgent needs of children and families inside Ukraine and in neighbouring countries.