Sunday 19 June 2022 12:34 AM Rescuing his cat from rubble and singing away the pain: Boy, 8, keeps diary of ... trends now
At first glance, they are drawings like those of any eight-year-old, but the simple pictures created by Yehor Kravstov tell a far darker story. His stickmen are dead bodies or soldiers. The smoke billowing from buildings is not from chimneys but the result of fires ignited by airstrikes. His words about his grandfather are not of joy, but of death.
Yehor began his journal in early April as he and his family cowered in a bunker to escape Russia’s relentless shelling of Mariupol, the besieged city on Ukraine’s southern coast, which had started five weeks earlier.
‘I had a good sleep, woke up, smiled, got up and counted to 25,’ reads the opening line, recounting the events of March 18.
Yehor, 8, poses with mother Olena Kravstova, 38, in Kyiv after they escaped Mariupol bombs
The next is jolting. ‘My grandfather died,’ he wrote. ‘I have a wound on my back, torn skin. Sister head injury.
'Mother had flesh torn out of her arm and a hole in her leg.’
Chillingly, Yehor’s diary records how the family sang together as they bandaged their wounds.
Now in Kyiv after escaping Mariupol last month after the city’s last defenders surrendered at the Azovstal steel plant, Yehor and his mother Olena tell how air raid sirens heralded the start of the feared Russian attack on February 24.
Yehor’s school shut and Olena, 38, was sent home from her job at a utilities company. ‘We live near Azovstal and it was a little bit scary, but no one believed that a full-scale war had begun all over Ukraine and Russia started bombing us,’ she says. Supplies of electricity, gas and water were soon cut off, so Olena, Yehor and his older sister Nika, 15, moved into the nearby home of their grandparents, Volodymyr and Tetyana.
With temperatures plunging to -4C at night, the family huddled together for warmth. Meanwhile, a relentless Russian barrage left scenes in Mariupol that recalled the devastation of Leningrad and Stalingrad in the Second World War.
As many as 20,000 residents are
