Ukraine's Zelensky reads Anne Frank's diAry

I slept good, woke up and smiled. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine read those opening words from The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank at a conference focusing on children on Wednesday, seeking to highlight the toll that Russia's invasion of its youngest citizens has taken on its youngest citizens: In 15 months of war, at least 483 children had been killed, and other estimates suggest that the toll is even higher.

It's valuable when there are air-raid sirens every night, and just sleeping is happiness, he said. If there are missile attacks every night and waking up in the morning for a week is truly priceless, then it's a win-win situation. hours after he spoke, a nine-year-old girl and her 34-year-old mother were woken in the predawn hours by the wail of an air-raid alarm in Kyiv. The two raced to what they thought would be the safety of a bomb shelter at a children s hospital in the city, but, according to Mayor Vitali Klitschko, they died just outside the door.

Russian ballistic missiles had been flying toward the city at a speed of five times the speed of sound as the two standing outside the hospital building, the police said. One of the missiles was hit by a Ukrainian interceptor missile in the skies above, and the child and her mother were killed by the fiery debris. The child's grandmother arrived to identify the bodies.