SEVASTOPOL, June 02, /ITAR-TASS/. The “I&Camp” international youth center in the village of Peschanoye, the Crimea, on Monday received a group of children evacuated from Slavyansk, an East Ukrainian city, which the Ukrainian army has been shelling massively over the past few weeks.
A minor problem emerged when the Artek children’s center and a camp in Foros said they could not accept the children because they were already full. A working party set up under the city government of Sevastopol came to their rescue.
“When we learnt the kids could not be received in Artek and there was a problem, we got in. We decided that we need to help our neighbors who have a problem. And we helped,” Sergei Menyailo, the acting governor of the federal city of Sevastopol, said in an interview with Itar-Tass on Monday.
The working party talked to the parents of children from Sevastopol, who showed great understanding and agreed that their children would have a vacation in another camp. Moreover, money was found to pay for the rest of the Slavyansk children at the international youth camp in Peschanoye.
Representatives of the Sevastopol-based Rusichi center for the protection of family and childhood have visited the young refugees from Slavyansk in the camp and gave them gifts.
“It was as if we had found ourselves at a Mediterranean Sea resort. The children who had lived under bombs for months without leaving basements adapted themselves very quickly. We believe that five meals a day and sea air will quickly restore their health and strength,” Pavel Butsai, a representative of the Rusichi center, said.
Meanwhile, Russian Children’s Rights Ombudsman Pavel Astakhov has called on children’s ombudsmen in European countries to pay attention to gross violation of children’s rights in areas of military conflict in Ukraine.
“In connection with the events in southeastern Ukraine, which is being torn by civil war accompanied by a humanitarian disaster, I have been receiving numerous requests from Russian nationals whose relatives are the citizens of Ukraine trapped in areas of military hostilities or from Ukrainian nationals, predominantly from southeastern Ukraine, to help evacuating their families with children to the territory of Russia,” the ombudsman’s press service said on Monday.
Astakhov drew the attention of European children’s ombudsmen “to facts of gross violation by Ukraine’s ruling regime of the United Nations Convention on Human Rights, the 1949 Geneva Convention and protocols to them. He also called on his European colleagues to take all possible measures to ease the fate of peaceful civilians in southeastern Ukraine, including the organisation of humanitarian corridors with an aim to evacuate children and families with children from areas where military hostilities are under way.