Today is the Day of Missing Children: how many minors have disappeared in Ukraine since the beginning of Russian aggression

Today, May 25, many countries around the world are marking the Day of Missing Children. The event was initiated in the United States, and since 2002 it has gained the status of "international," UNN writes.

On May 25, 1979, six-year-old boy Ethan Patz did not return home from school. Not only the police and the local community began searching for the child. The news of the tragedy affected the entire American society, but the boy was never found. Four years later, the then US President Ronald Reagan proclaimed May 25 as the Day of the Missing Children.

Ethan Patz was officially declared dead only in 2000. In 2010, the police reopened the case. In 2012, a suspect, Pedro Hernandez, was arrested and confessed to strangling the boy. A jury in 2017 sentenced Hernandez to life in prison.

Every year, the number of people and countries joining this event has been steadily increasing.

Its goal is to draw humanity's attention to the problem of missing children, to engage in intensifying the search, to raise parents' awareness of methods of protecting children from abduction, and to disseminate information about missing children through the media.

Every year, for example, more than 450,000 reports of missing children are registered in the United States, up to 250,000 in the European Union, and in Ukraine this figure fluctuated around ten thousand. Most of the children were found alive and unharmed fairly quickly.

As of the end of last year, since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, 23,000 children have been reported missing.

At the moment, more than two thousand children are officially missing in Ukraine.  

Most of them are orphans and children deprived of parental care who remained in the occupied territories.