Blood of Babies Spilled in March
Russians Welcome Spring in Odessa by Killing Five Children
I woke up early in Kyiv on March 2nd, 2024 to an alert on my phone:
One woman and her 4-month-old baby under the rubble of a high-rise building.
It was an alert from the Odesa-Info Telegram channel.
I was sure it wasn’t my family. My daughter is seven months old. I still couldn’t shake the sinking feeling in my stomach.
On March 1st, Russia launched eight Iranian Sourced Shahed drones into the Odesa Region. One of the drones struck an apartment building, causing it to collapse.
Ten people died in the strike.
A father waited outside throughout the night and into the morning wrapped in a blanket while rescue workers had to carefully remove rubble and look for his three-year-old son Mark, his four-month-old son Timofey, and his wife.
He watched as they pulled the lifeless body of his toddler from the rubble, and his world was destroyed when they found the body of his baby wrapped in the arms of his wife. The mother died trying to protect her baby. The baby died in the arms of his mother.
On the first day of Spring, two years after the full-scale invasion, the Russians celebrated by killing five children ages four months, seven months, three years, eight years, and ten years old. They never got to see their first flowers bloom.
Unfortunately, I cannot post the photos of the ten-year-old boy, dead, partially covered in debris. Laying in the fetal position, wearing his Batman pajamas. The picture of the dead mother holding her dead child. That would be against Medium’s policy.
The murder of these five children didn’t even make a blip on national news. No global outrage. When I was in Iraq, an Apache attack helicopter engaged a van, allegedly killing a reporter. That stayed in the news cycle for years. It even ended up in textbooks years later during my media studies.
The mood here has been heavy. The Shahed drone attacks have only increased. We’ve had to grab the children and run to the parking garage every night for the last week. In the last two days, the air raid siren has gone off during the day; we even had a missile strike near the port when President Zelenskyy was in town with the Greek president.
The photos of the children haunt me. I see them when I look at my seven-month-old daughter’s face.
Slava Ukraine!
Update:
15 Mar 2024
This afternoon Russia launched two Kinjal rockets into Odesa. So far there are ten dead and fifty casualties. The first missile struck a residential neighborhood, the second missile struck when first responders arrived on the scene.
