By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Pope Francis renewed his appeal for peace in “battered” Ukraine on Sunday and said now is the time to abolish war before it erases humanity from history.
“More than a month has passed since the invasion of Ukraine, since the start of this cruel and senseless war, which, like every war, is a defeat for all, for all of us,” he said Sunday during his weekly Angelus address.
“We must repudiate war, a place of death where fathers and mothers bury their children, where men kill their brothers without even seeing them, where the powerful decide and the poor die. War does not only devastate the present but also the future of society,” he went on to say.
The Pontiff reiterated his appeal for an end to the conflict in Ukraine.
“Faced with the danger of self-destruction, humanity must understand that the time has come to abolish war. To erase it from human history before it erases man from history,” he said.
“Enough. Stop. Let the weapons fall silent. Negotiate seriously for peace,” he said. “War cannot be something that is inevitable. We cannot get used to war.”
Meanwhile from 4 a.m. on 24 February 2022, when the Russian Federation’s armed attack against Ukraine started, to 24:00 midnight on 23 March 2022 (local time), the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) recorded 2,685 civilian casualties in the country: 1,035 killed and 1,650 injured. This included:
- a total of 1,035 killed (214 men, 160 women, 14 girls, and 28 boys, as well as 48 children and 571 adults whose sex is yet unknown)
- a total of 1,650 injured (181 men, 140 women, 28 girls, and 23 boys, as well as 67 children and 1,211 adults whose sex is yet unknown)
- On territory controlled by the self-proclaimed ‘republics’: 267 casualties (56 killed and 211 injured)In Donetsk and Luhansk regions: 1,168 casualties (311 killed and 857 injured)
- On Government-controlled territory: 901 casualties (255 killed and 646 injured)
- In other regions of Ukraine (the city of Kyiv, and Cherkasy, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Kherson, Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Odesa, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk and Zhytomyr regions), which were under Government control when casualties occurred: 1,517 casualties (724 killed and 793 injured)
Most of the civilian casualties recorded were caused by the use of explosive weapons with a wide impact area, including shelling from heavy artillery and multiple-launch rocket systems, and missile and air strikes.
OHCHR believes that the actual figures are considerably higher, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration. This concerns, for example, Mariupol and Volnovakha (Donetsk region), Izium (Kharkiv region), Sievierodonetsk and Rubizhne (Luhansk region), and Trostianets (Sumy region), where there are allegations of numerous civilian casualties. These figures are being further corroborated and are not included in the above statistics.
OHCHR notes the report of the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, according to which as of 8 a.m. (local time) 24 March, 128 children had been killed and at least 172 injured. OHCHR also notes the report of the Head of the Investigative Department of the National Police of Kharkiv region, according to which as of 6 p.m. (local time) 23 March, 294 civilians had been killed in the region, including 15 children.