‘Jesus… This Is Just Awful’: Emotional Anderson Cooper Reacts to Hospice Children Fleeing Ukraine

Anderson Cooper understandably got a little choked up when reacting to a report from CNN’s Arwa Damon about Ukrainian children in hospice care being ferried to safety.

Reporting from Warsaw, Damon explained that children at palliative care facilities in and around Kharkiv had managed to be evacuated via train into Poland, along with some of their family members. Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv has come under heavy assault by the Russian military, which appears to be increasingly targeting civilians.

“The carriage is filled with the sort of emotion that is too intense, too incomprehensible for words,” Damon said in her report. “But it is also filled with so much love, love among strangers seen the tenderness of the touch of the medical team, the whispered words of, ‘You are safe now.'”

Damon’s report featured emotional relatives comforting their very ill children far away from their homes. One woman explained that she keeps trying to reach her family in Ukraine after hearing that her town was bombed.

“Nobody is picking up the phone,” she said tearfully. “There are just the beeps, and that’s it.”

Reporting from Lviv, Ukraine, an emotional Cooper reacted to the report by telling Damon,

I know this a cliché, but I mean, if moms ruled the world, things would be a lot different. The strength of that mom who’s getting just beeps on the phone when she calls back to her village that’s been bombed and she can’t reach her husband and her other children, and she’s on this train hurtling in the dead of night with her daughter on the floor. I mean, Jesus. This is, it’s just, this is just awful. This is just awful.

Watch above via CNN.