Members of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), have now been 500 days on strike against Warrior Met Coal, (previously known as Walter Energy.)

The miners went on strike in April of 2021 over a host of grievances: little-to-no raises, long working hours, cuts to healthcare, and cuts to their retirements. They accepted many of these concessions in 2016 to bring the company out of bankruptcy, at a cost to the miners of around $1 billion over the term of the contract, according to the union. 

The workers simply wanted something approximating a restoration of the pre-bankruptcy status quo. Warrior Met instigated the strike by refusing these modest demands.

Republican politicians have responded to this long-term work action with characteristic indifference, or overt support for the company. On the state level, Republicans are openly siding against the workers. Alabama Governor Kay Ivey has mobilized state troopers to escort scabs crossing the picket line. On October 27, 2021, a Republican Tuscaloosa County Judge issued an injunction telling Alabama coal miners that they are not allowed to protest their employer. For several months, striking workers were limited in the number of picketers they could have on the line, and for a few months they could have none at all. The lack of support from Republicans is both typical, shameful but to be expected.

But the strike has also been largely met with silence from Democrats, including at the federal level, despite the Biden administration’s claim to stand with unions. While local rank-and-file Democrats have helped by donating to the strike fund and collecting donations, Democratic Party office holders have been totally absent. Some have spoken at rallies, yet only one elected Alabama Democrat, Tuscaloosa State Representative Chris England, has been to a picket line, and asked how he can help.

Lacking political power in the state, the federal leaders of the party could be doing far more. Yet, the White House and the Labor Department have both been mostly silent. Why hasn’t Labor Secretary Marty Walsh been loudly commenting on the Warrior Met strike?

The workers have been complaining that none of the politicians care. What these workers are left with in terms of material support from political leaders is virtually nothing, and at a time when the need could not be more urgent. The company is trying to shake the union down for millions in reimbursements for ​“unlawful strike activity,” including lost production. And with the skyrocketing price of steel, even operating the mines at a lower capacity has allowed the company to turn a profit (even though it is missing out on $1 billion dollars in potential revenue, according to UMWA). 

It is unconscionable that the ​“most pro-union president in history” and nearly the entire political party that he leads has allowed this strike to go on this long without strong support.

500 Days Into the Warrior Met Coal Strike, Where Are Joe Biden and the Democrats? – In These Times

 “Putin’s war is funded through money from fossil fuels and these fossil fuels are causing climate breakdown as we speak,” said Svitlana Romanko, director of the Ukrainian NGO Razom We Stand.

Carbon bombs are fossil-fuel extraction projects identified by researchers to contain at least 1bn tonnes of climate-heating CO2, triple the UK’s annual emissions. Russia is a hotspot, with 40 carbon bombs, 19 of them operated or developed by Russian companies backed by foreign finance. The companies are Gazprom, Novatek, Lukoil, Rosneft oil company and Tatneft. More than 400 foreign financial institutions had provided $130bn (£109bn) of support to the Russian companies – $52bn in investment and $84bn in credit. 

Financial institutions in the US hold almost half the foreign investment in Russian carbon bomb companies, with 154 institutions holding $23.6bn. The largest combination of investment and credit – $10bn – was provided by JPMorgan Chase.

The biggest single investment in the Russian carbon bomb companies was the $15.3bn in Rosneft held by the Qatar Investment Authority, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund.

The UK was third in the list of investing nations, with 32 financial institutions holding $2.5bn in investments. HSBC had the largest investment and credit total, at $308m.

 Financial groups in Japan, Norway, Switzerland and the Netherlands also held significant investments, while Chinese and Italian institutions provided $45bn in credit between them.

 Kjell Kühne, at Leave it in the Ground Initiative (Lingo), said: “This war has made really clear that, when you don’t care who you’re doing business with, it does translate into human suffering and lives lost. It’s also clear we should not be investing in new fossil fuel projects, as the International Energy Agency has confirmed. Anybody involved in these projects should be really questioning what they’re doing.”

 Lingo said some financial institutions may have reduced their support for the Russian companies since the war started, but that many seemed to have adopted a wait-and-see approach.

UK and US banks among biggest backers of Russian ‘carbon bombs’, data shows | Fossil fuels | The Guardian

There are observable differences in such things as skin color and hair texture, as well as some patterns in predisposition to disease based on ancestors’ geographic origins, but the idea of separate races was created by humans and is not found in nature.

There are no known biologically based differences in intellectual, psychological, or moral attributes between human populations from different regions of the world. There is individual variation within any human population in a particular place (obviously, individuals in any society differ in a variety of traits). But there are no meaningful biologically based differences between populations in the way people are capable of thinking, feeling, or making decisions. We are one species. We are all basically the same animal.

Although we are one species, there are obvious cultural differences among human populations around the world. Those cultural differences aren’t a product of human biology; that is, they aren’t the product of any one group being significantly different genetically from another, especially in ways that could be labeled cognitively superior or inferior. So why have different cultures developed in different places? The most obvious answer is that it is the result of humans living under different material conditions.

We conclude that the type of living arrangements that groups of humans develop arise from the differences in geography, climate, and environmental conditions. Absent any other credible explanation, we assume that the different material realities under which humans have lived have shaped the variations in human culture. People make choices to build cultures in specific ways, but if all people are basically the same animal, then the differences in those choices around the world are most likely the product of those different conditions.

We are not suggesting that we have no control over our lives but simply that we likely don’t have as much control as many people would like to believe. This is true of us individually and collectively. The conditions under which a culture emerged may have led to ecologically sustainable living arrangements, but those living arrangements would have been different if initial conditions had been different. If Culture A created an ecologically sustainable way to live and Culture B created an unsustainable system, it is important to highlight the differences, endorse Culture A, and try to change Culture B. Geography shapes people, and people act to shape the meaning of geography, making choices along the way. But not all people throughout history and around the world have been presented with the same choices by the landscapes on which they have lived. 

We want to be clear about how we understand racial and ethnic differences in the context of political and economic history. Europe is not rich because Europeans are racially superior. Europe is rich because it developed on a different trajectory from that of the Americas, Africa, and Asia as a result of geographic and environmental differences. That trajectory made it possible for Europeans to conquer and exploit the people and resources of those other continents. At one point, Europeans believed themselves intellectually and morally superior because of racial differences that were assumed to be immutable. We know that to be false. But if that’s false, then so is any other claim by any other group to be intellectually or morally superior on any criteria by virtue of a racial or ethnic identity.

If history was not shaped by the minor genetic differences that are associated with our ancestors’ region of the world, that leaves us with geography, climate, and environmental conditions, unless we want to argue that history is directed by gods. Geography shapes people, and people act to shape the meaning of geography, making choices along the way. But not all people throughout history and around the world have been presented with the same choices by the landscapes on which they have lived.  All organisms adapt to, and are shaped by, their places. There is no reason that humans should be exempt from that observation. While it’s true that humans’ physiology and cognitive capacity allow us to live almost anywhere on land on Earth, that doesn’t mean that geography has no relevance in how we have organized societies and developed new technologies.

Taken from here

We are One Species – CounterPunch.org

 The world’s top four grain traders, which have dominated the global grain market for decades – have seen record or near-record profits or sales.  The record bonanza amid soaring food prices around the world, raising concerns of profiteering and speculation in global food markets that could put staples beyond the reach of the poorest.

Food prices have surged more than 20% this year, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. About 345 million people are experiencing acute food insecurity, according to the World Food Programme, compared with 135 million before the Covid-19 pandemic.

Olivier De Schutter, a co-chair of IPES-Food (the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems) and UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said: 

“The fact that global commodity giants are making record profits at a time when hunger is rising is clearly unjust, and is a terrible indictment of our food systems. What’s even worse, these companies could have done more to prevent the hunger crisis in the first place.” Four companies – the Archer-Daniels-Midland Company, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus, known collectively as ABCD – control an estimated 70-90% of the global grain trade. “Global grain markets are even more concentrated than energy markets and even less transparent, so there is a huge risk of profiteering,” said De Schutter.

He said this year’s food price surge happened despite what are thought to be abundant global grain reserves, but there was insufficient transparency from the companies to show how much grain they hold and no way to force them to release stocks in a timely way. “We need to be looking at the grain giants and asking what they could have done to avert the crisis, and what they could be doing now,” De Schutter said.

Cargill reported a 23% increase in revenues to a record $165bn (£140bn) for the year ended 31 May, while Archer-Daniels-Midland made the highest profits in its history during the second quarter of the year. Sales at Bunge surged by 17% year on year in the second quarter, though its profits were affected by previously incurred charges. Louis Dreyfus reported profits for 2021 up by more than 80% on the previous year, as revenues rose by nearly a quarter to $1.62bn.

An NGO analysis suggests some food companies may be increasing their margins too.  Archers-Daniels-Midland increased its profit margin to 4.46% in the first quarter of this year, up from 3.65% in the same quarter in 2021, and Cargill’s margin increased from 2.5% last year to 3.2% this year.

Sandra Martinsone, a policy manager at Bond, a network of international development charities, said, “[The big agrifood companies] are clearly capitalising on the reduced supply and increased demand, further exacerbated by commodity trading,” she said. “When supply is significantly lower than demand, it gives space for price increase. But this is also exacerbated by speculative stock markets, since wheat and other commodities are traded on stock markets and therefore prices fluctuate.”

Alex Maitland, a senior adviser at Oxfam, said: “There are fears that speculation could be a driver in food price rises. Anything that causes hunger and starvation is immoral.”

Natalie Bennett, a UK Green party peer, explained, “…the handful of companies, with significant cross-ownership from hedge funds, that from seeds to supermarkets are major contributors to the inflation that’s driving the cost of living crisis to new heights.” 

Vicki Hird, the head of sustainable farming at the UK food coalition Sustain, pointed out,  “While farmers, consumers and food workers are suffering in the face of spiralling food and fuel prices, those sitting in the middle of the food chain – a small number of huge, dominant grain traders – are raking in vast profits.”

Despite rising input prices in the form of energy and fertiliser, all four of the ABCD companies profits look secure.

De Schutter said: “Ultimately, we need to break up the monopolies that have a stranglehold on the food chain. A handful of companies control global seed and fertiliser markets, animal genetics, the global grain trade, and food retail. They are making huge profits at the cost of farmers, consumers and the environment.”

Record profits for grain firms amid food crisis prompt calls for windfall tax | Food | The Guardian

 At the Ukraine Accountability Conference in The Hague last month the international criminal court’s (ICC) chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, urged world leaders: “In all situations across the world where international crimes are committed, we should feel the same urgency for action and for cooperation.”

A few days ago the head of the World Health Authority, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has suggested that racism is partly to blame for the lack of international interest in the conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray state.

Social justice must be for all – not just for whites.

The ICC has only targeted “anti-western” African leaders while brutal UK- and US-backed leaders in Africa continue to kill and maim with impunity. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) where Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda, has been fuelling some of the world’s bloodiest and nastiest killings. The slaughter and the raping, looting and displacement has not stopped.

In 2003, at the UN general assembly, the then DRC president, Joseph Kabila, called for the creation of an international criminal tribunal for the DRC to hold perpetrators to account. The appeal, echoed by Congolese civil society groups, was ignored, with the UK, US and a host of western governments looking the other way while giving Kagame guns and money to operate as he pleased.  So far it has targeted only “low hanging fruit” including Thomas Lubanga, the ICC’s first ever conviction in March 2012, then Germain Katanga and Bosco Ntaganda. What then is the ICC’s purpose in Africa if it cannot investigate a president over “aiding and abetting” some of these crimes?

By 2008, when UN investigators arrived in the DRC to look into crimes committed before 2002 – when the ICC has no mandate – more than 5.4 million Congolese people had died in the 10 years since a rebel group called Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD) was formed to loot the Congolese minerals.

In 2010, the UN published a 550-page report calling for the creation of a Congo tribunal to try 617 international allegations involving, among others, troops under President Kagame’s command in the DRC. That recommendation was ignored.

There are 5.6 million Congolese people internally displaced across the country. Another 27 million people, including 3.4 million children, are “acutely food insecure”. A 2011 US study estimated that 48 women were raped every hour. In 2017, UN investigators discovered 80 mass graves in the diamond-rich Kasai province. In 2019, the UN unearthed another 50 mass graves in Bandundu.

Where the victims of war are white, the ICC has already opened its own probe, its chief prosecutor has visited frontlines and sent its largest-ever field deployment and an international Ukraine war crimes tribunal to put Vladimir Putin in the dock is already in the pipeline.

Why then are the US and UK refusing to back the creation of an international criminal tribunal for DRC?

Justice should be colour blind. So why is it served for Ukraine but not the Congolese? | Vava Tampa | The Guardian

 Socialists are naturally concerned about whether or not political democracy exists under capitalism. The existence of some political democracy, limited and distorted though it must be by the class structure of capitalism, is central to our case for the peaceful propagation of socialist ideas culminating in the peaceful establishment of socialism by democratic political action based on majority socialist understanding. Freedom of discussion is the ideal, even indispensable, condition for the development of socialist ideas since it is only out of a full and frank discussion of their experiences under capitalism that the working class can come to acquire the majority socialist understanding necessary before capitalism can be replaced by socialism.

In the years since Russia followed Western advice from free marketeers to start privatising the state assets, a small number of people with links to officialdom became phenomenally rich. Having achieved power, Putin has sought to strengthen the Russian state and reassert Kremlin control of its regions and republics, where nepotism, corruption and crime abound. This increased militarisation of society, authoritarianism, and centralising of power, bonding with a tendency to see others as being either state or anti-state—just as in the USSR era when everything was categorised as Soviet or anti-Soviet. Putin’s desire is to return to Stalinist-style oppressive rule.It is because governments compete economically to help their own nation’s businesses (keeping wages, taxes and welfare low, weakening trade unions etc), so they must compete if they are to avoid others obtaining easy commercial advantages through armed intimidation and attack. Putin can also gain some domestic political advantage from nationalistic prestige and pride engendered in the population, but the overriding purpose of military expansion is to assist the possessors of productive assets. Because there are groups of oligarchs all over the world, populations are encouraged to see one another as “us” and “them”, or “the enemy”. The Russian people will continue to suffer from exploitation, poverty, deprivation, early deaths and assorted other troubles—including further dead sailors, soldiers and pilots. 

Ukraine is one of the artificial “nation-States” set up after the collapse of the Soviet Union, containing within its borders not only people whose mother-tongue is Ukrainian but a considerable minority whose first language is Russian.

A mere glance at the map of Europe shows why, for strategic reasons, Ukraine could never hope to pursue an independent foreign policy for any length of time. One end of the country points into central, the other leads into Russia. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was motivated mainly by strategic considerations, the fear that the political changes begun in Maidan 2014 coup would lead to it to increasingly break away from the Russian empire.

In the post-war struggle between East and West to establish spheres of economic and political influence, global networks of alliances have been sealed with aid in the form of arms and supportive technology. The foreign policies of the two major powers have been essentially nothing more than preparations for war. It has continued despite the fall of the Iron Curtain. The barbarism of the war in Ukraine cannot be explained in terms of conflicting ideologies of malevolent leaders and nothing is more fallacious than the idea that increases in knowledge and the progress of what is called civilisation bring with them increased social harmony. The sterility and waste of capitalism are laid bare in its wars — men fall in their millions that shares might rise.

By disempowering all the presidents, the admirals, the generals, the ministers, the tycoons and any other minority who wants ownership and control of resources and people, choosing instead to possess and run these means of living ourselves. No more propertied class. No more leaders. No more us and them.

 Chief executives of the UK’s 100 biggest companies have seen their pay jump by 39% to an average of £3.4m,  compared with £2.5m in 2020 during the height of the coronavirus pandemic when many bosses took a voluntary pay cut as they placed millions of employees on furlough. CEO pay has also surpassed the £3.25m median recorded in 2019, before the pandemic according to research by the High Pay Centre thinktank and the Trades Union Congress.

The jump in executive pay means that the average UK CEO now collects 109 times that paid to the average British worker, up from 79 times in 2020.

The data also shows that FTSE 100 CEOs’ annual bonuses jumped to £1.4m compared with £828,000 in 2020. Nine in 10 of the bosses received a bonus.

In total, the FTSE 100 firms spent more than £720m on pay awarded to 224 top executives. 

Frances O’Grady, the general secretary of the TUC, said the growing disparity between pay at the top and that paid to workers is fuelling the cost of living crisis. 

“Workers deserve a fair share of the wealth they create. But right now, CEO pay is soaring while working people experience the biggest real wage falls in 20 years, she said. “These unbalanced pay policies have seen the gap widen between workers and bosses this year, adding to the cost of living crisis.”

Luke Hildyard, director of the High Pay Centre, said: “Very high executive pay is a big part of the cost of living problem. If large employers are paying millions more to already very wealthy executives, that makes it harder to fund pay increases for low and middle income workers.”

The highest paid FTSE 100 CEO, according to the research, was Sebastien De Montessus of Endeavour, which operates goldmines in Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso and Senegal. He was paid £16.9m. The second-highest paid boss was Pascal Soriot of AstraZeneca, who was paid £13.9m.

Average pay for FTSE 100 chiefs jumps by 39% to £3.4m | Executive pay and bonuses | The Guardian

 Ominous warnings keep coming non-stop: some of the world’s developing nations are heading towards mass hunger. 

The World Food Programme (WFP) warned last week that as many as 828 million people go to bed hungry every night while the number of those facing acute food insecurity has soared — from 135 million to 345 million — since 2019. A total of 50 million people in 45 countries are teetering on the edge of famine. The WFP says it requires $22.2 billion to reach 152 million people in 2022. However, with the global economy reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, the gap between needs and funding is bigger than ever before.

What seems like a cruel paradox is that the US Department of Agriculture estimates that a staggering $161 billion worth of food is dumped yearly into landfills in the United States. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said last November food waste in the United States is estimated at between 30–40 percent of the food supply.

“Wasted food is the single largest category of material placed in municipal landfills and represents nourishment that could have helped feed families in need. Additionally, water, energy, and labor used to produce wasted food could have been employed for other purposes’, said the FDA.

Professor Dr David McCoy, Research Lead at United Nations University International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH), described the heartbreaking image of food being dumped in landfills while famine and food insecurity grows, must also be juxtaposed with the ecological harms caused by the dominant modes of food production which in turn will only further deepen the crisis of widespread food insecurity.

“The need for radical and wholesale transformation to the way we produce, distribute and consume food has been recognized for years. However, powerful actors – most notably private financial institutions and the giant oligopolist corporations who make vast profits from the agriculture and food sectors – have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Their resistance to change must be overcome if we are to avoid a further worsening of the hunger and ecological crises.” 

Frederic Mousseau, Policy Director at the Oakland Institute, stated that according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), global food production and stocks are at historic high levels in 2022, with only a slight contraction compared to 2021.

“Skyrocketing food prices seen this year are rather due to speculation and profiteering than the war in Ukraine. It is outrageous that WFP has been forced to expand its food relief operations around the world due to speculation, while also having to raise more funds as the costs of providing food relief has increased everywhere”, he said.

Mousseau pointed out that WFP’s costs increased by $136 million in West Africa alone due to high food and fuel prices, whereas at the same time, the largest food corporations announced record profits totaling billions. Louis Dreyfus and Bunge Ltd had respectively 82.5% and 15% jump in profits so far this year. Cargill had a 23% jump in its revenue. Profits of a handful of food corporations that dominate the global markets already exceed $10 billion this year – the equivalent of half of the $22 billion that WFP is seeking to address the food needs of 345 million people in 82 countries.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that it is important that all governments and the private sector cooperate to bring them to market. Without fertilizer in 2022, he said, there may not be enough food in 2023.

Getting more food and fertilizer out of Ukraine and Russia is critical to further calm commodity markets and lower prices for consumers

Danielle Nierenberg, President and Founder, Food Tank said the amount of food that is wasted in the world is a huge environmental problem–if food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions.

“We’ve done a good job over the last decade of creating awareness around food waste, but we haven’t done enough to actually convince policymakers to take concrete action…” 

Millions Go Hungry– While Billions Worth of Food Go into Landfills | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

The SOYMB blog does not hold any confidence that governments will place people’s priorities before business profits.

 At one time, the plight of the Rohingya was headline news but now there is scarcely a mention in the media of the problems that they still face.

Nearly all of the approximately 730,000 Rohingya who fled Myanmar in the second half of 2017 remain in sprawling refugee camps in southern Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar. The total number of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh – including both those displaced by the 2017 atrocities and the several hundred thousand who sought refuge earlier – is close to one million. To date, not a single refugee has returned to Rakhine State through the formal repatriation mechanism that Myanmar and Bangladesh set up in 2017.  The Myanmar government showed no sign of addressing refugees’ concerns on key points, such as citizenship, security and livelihoods, failing to provide proper information on even the most basic questions, such as where the refugees — many of whom came from villages that the military razed to the ground after the 2017 exodus — would be sent after arriving at transit camps on the Myanmar side of the border. Myanmar shows little inclination to do more than pay lip service to repatriation efforts.

Living conditions for the refugees are poor and worsening. Most live in Kutupalong, the largest refugee camp in the world. They have few job opportunities and little access to formal education, while crime and violence, including killings of Rohingya community leaders, are on the rise. Factions within the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), which launched attacks in Rakhine State in 2016 and 2017 that the Myanmar military used to justify its crackdown on the Muslim minority, have been fighting with rival groups for control of the camps. 

This development was foreseeable: for a country that still has high levels of poverty and unemployment, hosting over a million refugees is clearly an enormous challenge, particularly for the communities hosting them in Cox’s Bazar. 

Bangladesh is also making life more difficult for the refugees. It has progressively placed greater restrictions on their movement, including by fencing off the camps, and closed some private schools and businesses that were being run inside. There has also been little progress on delivering formal education using the Myanmar curriculum, something that many refugees say they want and Crisis Group has advocated for. 

For the estimated 600,000 Rohingya still in Myanmar, nearly all of whom live in Rakhine State, the situation remains bleak. The military regime has tightened restrictions on movement in some areas — and the country’s economic collapse over the past eighteen months has further worsened their plight. Around 120,000 live in displacement camps that were set up following an outbreak of communal violence in 2012. They are almost entirely dependent on international aid. The remaining Rohingya are also often caught between the military and the Arakan Army — sometimes having to pay taxes to both sides or wrestle with duplicative administrative requirements. Many would likely be caught in the crossfire if war were to resume. Not surprisingly, some are trying to leave the country through risky and expensive overland journeys, mainly to Malaysia. 

The coup also appears to have triggered something of a shift in the way at least some within the broader Myanmar population view the Rohingya. The vast majority among the country’s Burman majority population had accepted the military’s claims that its 2017 operations against the Muslim minority were a legitimate response to a terrorist attack, in part because the immensely popular Aung San Suu Kyi had also propagated this narrative. After the coup, though, many experienced or witnessed for the first time the military’s capacity for inflicting extreme violence on civilians, something that had until then been largely confined to ethnic minority regions. The junta’s brutality against Burman communities appears to have prompted some to reassess the events of 2017, concluding that the military did indeed commit atrocities against the Rohingya.

The National Unity Government (NUG), a parallel administration formed by ousted lawmakers and operating mostly from abroad, has also adopted a policy toward the Rohingya that guarantees their right to citizenship and commits to ending other discriminatory policies against them. Although these promises have not been tested, because the NUG is not in control of the state, they are nevertheless notable given that the NUG is largely an offshoot of Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD, which did little to dismantle repressive policies against the Rohingya when it was in power.

Q&A: Five years on, Rohingya refugees face dire conditions and a long road ahead – Bangladesh | ReliefWeb

Between February 24 and August 10, at least 942 children were killed or injured in Ukraine – an average of five children every day — with 356 children losing their lives and 586 wounded, according to data from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

The UN has said that the total number of casualties is likely to be much higher than those currently verified and the exact ages of all child casualties are not all known.

 Most of the verified child casualties were due to the use of explosive weapons in populated, urban areas.

Children in parts of the country are growing up on the frontlines of brutal warfare as urban areas are used as battlefields, leading to deaths and life-changing injuries, and destroying infrastructure needed to guarantee access to life-saving food and water.

Millions of children from Ukraine have fled their homes, with an estimated 3.1 million children living as refugees in neighbouring countries. About 3 million children are believed to be internally displaced inside Ukraine.

Save the Children’s Country Director in Ukraine, Sonia Khush, explained,  “Although children in Ukraine have nothing to do with the causes of the war, they are the ones most affected by it. They are growing up to the sound of bombs and shelling, and to the sight of their homes being destroyed, their schools damaged and their friends and family members being killed or injured.” Khush continued: “Children need more than humanitarian aid, they need hope: hope that this war will end; hope that they can return home; and hope for a bright future. Without meaningful support and an immediate cessation of hostilities, Ukraine will not only become a graveyard for even more children but also for children’s hopes and dreams.”

Save the Children is calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities as the only way to protect children from violence and other violations of their rights. The aid agency condemns attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, including schools and hospitals, and the use of ballistic missiles and other inaccurate explosive weapons, which are causing civilian casualties, and violate international humanitarian law.

At least 16% of children killed in six months of war in Ukraine aged under 5 – Ukraine | ReliefWeb