Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Zaynab Bedawi.

What can be done to help the children of Ukraine?

Two-thirds of them have been forced to flee their homes.

Many have reportedly been subjected to physical abuse.

Some unaccompanied minors are being sent abroad by desperate parents,

leaving them vulnerable to exploitation by traffickers. My guest is the

CEO of the charity Save the Children International, Inga Ashing. What is her organisation doing

and is the war in Ukraine taking the focus off other global hotspots, leaving millions of children

in peril.

Inga Ashing, welcome to hard talk.

Around 2 million children have fled Ukraine.

Two and a half million are internally displaced. That amounts collectively to two-thirds of all the children in Ukraine.

Just tell us what the impact of the war has been on them. I would say that every war is a war on children and we see children in Ukraine. Just tell us what the impact of the war has been on them.

I would say that every war is a war on children and we see that in Ukraine every day. As you said,

two thirds of the child population have to flee their homes. About 600 have been killed or injured.

And the trauma that children are witnessing every day is something that will be with them for decades unless we support them.

So just to paint the picture, so I say the children, we are supporting in a number of ways.

And one of the things that we do is that we are providing what we call child-friendly spaces.

That is a place where children can come, play, draw, just be children for a while. And we do

that at our reception centres. When children come to those child-friendly spaces, they are invited to

participate in different activities. And we had Hilda, a 12-year-old girl, drawing a picture of a Ukrainian

woman dressed in Ukrainian flag and being bombed.

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