Russia-Ukraine war: the viral photo of a 9-year-old girl with a rifle in her hand

In the last few hours, a photo of a Ukrainian girl sitting on a window with a lollipop in her mouth and a rifle in her hand has gone viral. In her hair she wears a blue and yellow ribbon, colors of the Ukrainian flag. She looks outside, as if she is watching. She was even shared on Twitter by the former president of the European Council, Donald Tusk.

The picture was taken by the girl’s own father, the Kiev photographer Oleksii Kyrychenko and published on their Facebook and Instagram accounts with the title “Young girl with candy”, “girl with a candy”.

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In the comments of the posts, Kyrychenko said that he took the photo “to draw the world’s attention to Russian aggression against Ukraine”.

“The world needs to know,” he added.

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Kyrychenko also confirmed that the girl in the photo is her 9-year-old daughter and that it was staged.

According to what he said, the gun is his and it was not loaded.

Another similar photo with her daughter

In fact, the photo he shared yesterday is the second of its kind he’s taken. The February 22two days before the Russian invasion, he posted a similar image of his daughter with a rifle in her hand, looking out the window with the hashtag #standwithukraine (support Ukraine).

Although it was a staging, and for now there are no reports of children fighting, the image is not far from the reality of what is happening in Ukraine for the Russian invasion.

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days ago, the team of TN showed as in the basement of a Lviv school teenagers took shooting lessons with air rifles.

In a Ukrainian school, converted into a shelter, the boys learn to shoot (Photo: TN capture)

“I think that very soon all this will end and my school will be to study mathematics or physics and not to learn to shoot,” said the director of the place, Irina, about the conflict.

Almost 80 children died in the war in Ukraine

On Friday, President of Ukraine Volodimir Zelensky said that since the beginning of the Russian invasion of his country 78 Ukrainian children were killed.

“They died by Russian missiles and bombardments,” the president emphasized.

This Saturday, the Ukrainian Juvenile Prosecutor’s Office raised the figure to 79 and said that a hundred were injured in the Russian attacks.

“During the 16 days of war in Ukraine, 79 children have already died and almost 100 have been injured. Most of the victims were in the Kiev, Kharkov, Donetsk, Sumy, Kherson and Zhitomir regions,” the report published on Telegram states.

According to the Ukrainian Prosecutor’s Office, this figure is not definitive “due to the lack of opportunity to inspect the places of attack, where the Russian armed forces are carrying out their hostile activities.”

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Until now, more than 280 educational institutions have been destroyed9 of them in total.

According to the document, on average 17 educational institutions are destroyed daily for attacks ordered by President Vladimir Putin.

In addition, some seven million children are deprived of the opportunity to study by the war and hundreds of thousands of them are among the refugees who fled the country.