It is one of the bloodiest chapters to date since the start of the war in Ukraine, depicting an eight-year-old boy in words and pictures: Igor Kravtsov kept a diary in Mariupol while Ukrainian forces defended the besieged city.
Spending weeks in a basement with his family, Igor filled the pages of a small blue notebook with a photo on the cover of an idyllic Greek landscape.
“I slept well, then woke up, smiled and read 25 pages. Also my grandfather died on April 26,” says Igor, reading a page from his diary after escaping, with his mother and sister, from the city he is now in. under the control of Russian forces.
The family managed to escape to Zaporizhia, which is located 225 kilometers northwest of Mariupol and is under the control of Ukrainian forces.
The roof of their house fell on the family from a rocket – all three were injured.
“I have a wound in my back, my skin was torn. My sister has been hit in the head, my mom’s arm muscles have been cut and she has a hole in her leg,” Igor wrote on another page of his diary.
“Everyone was crying”
It’s a sunny day in Zaporizhia and Igor plays badminton and rides a bike, away from the world of disaster he painted in his diary with a blue pen.
In these paintings there are armed men, tanks, a helicopter and buildings exploding. In one painting, the ceiling of his house appears to be collapsing after the rocket strike.
“I was frightened by the noise,” he wrote on one page, while another described how his family members cared for each other’s injuries and then went in search of water.
“I want to leave so much,” Igor writes at one point.
His mother, Olena Kravtsova, a single parent, burst into tears when she found her son’s diary.
“I took it to show to the family. Everyone was crying,” he told AFP.
“Maybe he wanted to express what he feels so as not to keep it inside him,” he estimates.
His 15-year-old sister, Veronica, who has a deep mark on her forehead, says she hopes “in the future the diary will be useful to someone”.
Photographs of the diary were first posted online by his grandfather’s brother, Gevgeny Sosnowski, a photographer who captured the battle to defend Mariupol before leaving the city last month.
The family lived near the Azovstal steel plant – the last to be handed over to Russian forces after three months of strong resistance by Ukrainian soldiers inside.
Today, Igor’s family lives in a refugee camp in Zaporizhia and plans to travel to the capital, Kyiv, in the coming days.
The boy’s mother says she is still in shock and is reluctant to share her experiences.
Asked if he wanted to continue writing in the future, Igor replied: “Probably”.
Source: AMPE
Source: Capital
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