Anderson Cooper melts as Ukrainian kids pull faces at him on camera

Anderson Cooper has given one of the most heartwarming interviews of the last two weeks on CNN, smiling sweetly as Ukrainian children made faces at him live on air.

The host spoke to Olena Gnes, who is a young mother of three living in Kyiv, and she outlined her experiences following the outbreak of war.

"Well hello Anderson, we're happy to see you," she said during the interview.

"We're still alive. We're fine, but today is one of the most difficult days for me personally. We are... in a curfew so we stayed all the time in the basement and most of the time Isiah was reading and following the news and the news is pretty bad especially what happened in Mariupol."

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While the content of the interview explored the stark reality of life for the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by war, her children couldn’t resist the temptation to pull faces at the presenter.

The young boy did his best impression of a tiger while his mother was speaking, and Cooper couldn't resist smiling.

Cooper struggles to stop laughing as Ukrainian kids he's interviewing make faces at the camerawww.youtube.com

"Oh, they're scary, they're scary tigers!" Cooper said.

It’s the latest interview to make headlines during the conflict, after a Ukrainian MP responded to being put on Vladimir Putin’s hit list in the best way.

Kira Rudyk in Kyiv is a target for the Russian regime but remained defiant at the news of being put on Putin’s target list.

Speaking to The Guardian, Rudyk was asked how she felt about it, and replied: “I’m on Putin’s kill list, but I’m also on Ukraine’s top ten bachelorettes list and I hope that these lists even one another [out].

“But, there is no good answer to that, right? We know that one of Putin’s ways of attacking us as Ukraine is destroying either Ukrainian parliamentarians or [the] President or government.”

The Independent has a proud history of campaigning for the rights of the most vulnerable, and we first ran our Refugees Welcome campaign during the war in Syria in 2015. Now, as we renew our campaign and launch this petition in the wake of the unfolding Ukrainian crisis, we are calling on the government to go further and faster to ensure help is delivered.

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