(Zaporizhia) This is one of the bloodiest chapters of the war in Ukraine told in the words and drawings of an eight-year-old boy: Yegor Kravtsov kept a secret diary in Mariupol, when the city fell under the control of the Russian forces.
Posted at 4:21 p.m.
Holed up for weeks in a cellar with his family, Iegor kept himself busy filling the pages of his little blue notebook, with an idyllic picture of Greece on the cover.
“I slept well, then I woke up, smiled and read 25 pages. Also, my grandfather died on April 26,” the boy recites as he reads a page from his diary, after escaping the fighting-torn town with his mother and sister.
The family managed to reach Zaporizhia, 225 kilometers northwest of Mariupol, in territory under Ukrainian control.
“I have a back injury, the skin is torn. My sister is hit in the head and my mum has torn her hand muscles and has a hole in her leg”, reads this little blond again from a page of his diary.
“Everyone was crying”
Under sunny skies in Zaporizhia, Iegor plays badminton and rides his bike, a far cry from the images of destruction he scribbled in his diary with a blue pen.
We recognize armed men, tanks, a helicopter and buildings on fire. In one of the drawings, we see the roof of his house collapsing following a missile strike.
“The noise scared me,” reads the boy’s diary. On another page, he describes how family members heal each other or go in search of drinking water.
“I want to leave so badly,” he wrote again.
His mother, Olena Kravtsova, says she burst into tears when she first saw the diary. “I showed it to the family, everyone was crying,” she told AFP.
“Maybe he just needed to express himself, so he wouldn’t have to keep all his emotions inside him,” she supposes.
Yegor’s older sister, Veronika, 15, who has a big scar on her head, hopes the diary “will be useful to someone in the future”.
Images from the notebook were first posted online by Yegor’s great-uncle, Yevgen Sosnovskiy, a photographer who documented the battle for Mariupol before fleeing the port city in May.
The family lived near the Azovstal steelworks, the last pocket of Ukrainian resistance to fall in Mariupol, the fighters entrenched there only surrendering at the end of May, after three months of intense fighting.
Yegor and his relatives are now housed in a shelter for displaced people in Zaporizhia and hope to reach Kyiv, the capital, in a few days.
According to his mother, the boy is still in shock and reluctant to talk about what he has been through. If asked if he wants to continue writing in the future, Yegor simply replies: “Probably”.