Moscow - More than 2.5 million children in Russia are living as vagabonds and that figure could soon rise to four million the head of Russia's children fund was quoted as saying yesterday on the occasion of International Children's Day.
Mr Albert Likhanov said that many wandering children were not in fact orphans at all, but had been abandoned by their parents who could not afford to bring them up.
Homelessness also is not the only threat facing Russia's children, according to the health ministry, which said yesterday that only one in 10 Russian children were healthy by the time they reached school-leaving age.
The rest acquired a variety of chronic diseases by the age of 17, due to the increase of alcoholism and drug use among teenagers, and the lack of booster immunisations for many illnesses, among other reasons, ITAR-TASS reported.