War children: the surrogate newborns stranded in Kyiv

Some of the conflict’s youngest victims are a group of babies carried by Ukrainian mothers for couples who live overseas

- KIM SENGUPTA

The youngest is just three days old, the oldest five months. They lie in rows of cots in a basement bunker to protect them from missiles and artillery strikes, innocents trapped by war, with deep uncertainty about what the future holds for them.

The babies are from surrogate mothers for foreign couples who cannot now come to Ukraine to collect them following the Russian invasion, while the violence makes it too dangerous to try to get them out of the country.

There are 11 nannies left looking after the 21 babies at the BioTexCom clinic in Kyiv out of 50 who were there before the conflict started and have now left to be with their families, many for safer areas out of Kyiv.

“It is hard work for those of us here, we are getting two to three hours sleep a night if we are lucky, that has been the case ever since the bombing began,” says Antonina Yefimovich. “My family have moved out of Kyiv. But I will stay here. What choice have I got? We are not going to abandon these babies.

“Most of the little ones would have been picked up by now. The five-month-old one has been here much longer than usual, but his parents are Chinese and sometimes the Chinese wait a bit longer than others to collect them, now of course they have got caught up in the war.

“We are living in this basement 24 hours a day apart from going upstairs for showers. There is bombing every night. Most of the babies normally sleep through it, but it is very worrying for us, not just for what may happen here, but to our families at home.”