The story of little Hassan Al-Khalaf, an eleven-year-old boy, who finally reached safety in Slovakia after joining the masses of refugees escaping the Russian invasion of Ukraine hit the headlines earlier in March. Like many other children in Ukraine, Hassan has left everything he knows behind in search of safety. It is nothing short of heart-breaking.

Hassan's mother, a widow, could not leave her own mother behind while the war was still raging back home, so she sent her little boy off alone on a trip of 1,000 km to Slovakia where his older brother studies. He arrived with just a plastic bag, a passport, and a phone number written on his little hand. Even the Slovak police were moved when Hassan arrived unaccompanied at the border control. They uploaded his story on their Facebook page describing him as a hero.

The war in Ukraine is an immediate as well as a growing threat to the lives of Ukrainian children and their families. As the fighting Intensifies, so does the need for humanitarian supplies that are running low as supplies fail to reach Ukraine.

According to the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), many children have been killed and wounded by flying shrapnel and gunfire. We are brought briefly into the lives of these children at war just as quickly as they are taken away. We see photographs of them dead in pictures that are uploaded to the Internet or to Facebook. UNICEF calculates that more than a million children have fled from Ukraine together with their families, desperately seeking safety and protection. Many children have witnessed the destruction of the safety of their homes, whilst the damage to infrastructure has left several thousand without safe drinking water and electricity. Another stark calculation also according to UNICEF is that a Ukrainian Child has become a refugee every single second since the start of the war,

UNICEF has also raised concerns about some children who are fleeing Ukraine unaccompanied by parents or adult relatives making them particularly vulnerable especially when they are moved across the border. As a result of this, they are more exposed to danger and the risk factor is multiplied. Children who are unaccompanied, especially for girls travelling on their own, gender-based violence, including trafficking is a real danger. They risk being abducted for sale and exploitation.

And while Pope Francis, head of the Roman Catholic Church, has been pleading for a ceasefire ever since the start of Russia’s brutal war of aggression in Ukraine, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill has not uttered a word against the invasion. A move that reportedly implies that the Patriarch is in lockstep with Putin’s war rhetoric. This exposes the Patriarch to accusations of alleged complicity in war crimes as well as crimes against humanity, including genocide.

Like Pope Francis, UNICEF, too, calls for an immediate ceasefire and reminds all parties involved about their international obligations to protect all children from harm and to make sure that humanitarian supplies can get to all the children in need safely and quickly.

We have all watched footage of the Russian airstrike on a maternity hospital in the city of Mariupol, where heavy shelling has become the order of the day, despite a ceasefire agreement for that very day.  In the wake of the indiscriminate bombing of the hospital in Mariupol, the war, or the “special military operation”, as the Russian propaganda machine chooses to describe it, is assuming apocalyptic proportions.   As I write, relentless heavy shelling of residential areas carries on in Mariupol constantly targeting civilians, whilst suburban gardens have been turned into battlefields.

But even amid all the suffering caused by this senseless war, there is something good that comes out of a bad situation.  That, despite everything, every dark cloud has a silver lining. The very good news is that twenty-one Ukrainian children, all cancer patients have been flown to the United Kingdom to start receiving life-saving treatment after nine British medics flew to Poland where the patients had been evacuated from Ukraine and accompanied the children on an urgent flight back to the UK.

This war continues to ravage Ukraine but there seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel. More devastation and destruction hangs over the country’s leadership like the sword of Damocles. Indeed the war must end immediately because when all is said and done, peace is the only sustainable solution.

 And while we will continue to show solidarity with our fellow Europeans in Ukraine, we must never forget all the men, women and little children who have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea during their perilous journey to the European mainland from North Africa. They too, were fleeing from violence.