At first glance, they appear to be ordinary eight-year-old drawings, but the simple images drawn by Yehor Kravstov reflect a much darker story. His stickmen are either dead people or troops. The smoke billowing from houses is caused by flames sparked by airstrikes, not chimneys. His grandfather’s words are not ones of joy, but of death.
Yehor began his notebook in early April, as he and his family sought refuge in a bunker to escape Russia’s unrelenting bombing of Mariupol, Ukraine’s beleaguered city on the country’s southern coast, which had begun 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.
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.
The family cuddled together for warmth as temperatures dropped to -4 degrees Celsius at night. Meanwhile, a persistent Russian bombardment left images in Mariupol reminiscent of the Second World War devastation of Leningrad and Stalingrad.
Up to 20,000 civilians are reported to have died during the 85-day assault, which concluded when Ukrainian fighters surrendered and emerged from the tunnels beneath Azovstal.
A cheeky Yehor is smiling as he sits with his mother in a Kyiv cafe, wearing a dinosaur T-shirt. He orders strawberry ice cream before proudly pulling out his diary from his silver rucksack. ‘The diary is always with us,’ his mother says.
Turning the pages, Yehor points to a drawing of a birthday party. ‘This is me in front of my cake,’ he says. ‘These are my friends and relatives. Some of them have wings because they died, they are like angels. One of them is my grandfather.’
He flicks to the next image. ‘Those are destroyed houses, burning houses, a killed person. I saw all of this with my own eyes. Here is a helicopter, a tank and soldiers.’
Apocalyptic photographs of Mariupol’s destroyed buildings, including a maternity hospital and a theatre where 600 people were killed, shocked the world. Yehor’s images are no less arresting.
Recalling the terrifying first weeks of the invasion, Olena says: ‘Russian planes began to fly over, bombing our houses from the air – and then the panic began. We observed death and destruction all around us day and night.’
Tragedy struck on March 18. ‘I was playing Lego and Nika was lying on a mattress. We played and joked,’ Yehor says. ‘Then grandfather runs in. He says that we need to hide in the bathroom. Then there was a blast and the ceiling collapsed. Everything was covered in dust, it seemed to me that I could not see anything anymore. Somehow, we survived. But grandfather died.’
Olena says her father took eight days to bleed to death. Wiping away tears, she adds: ‘My dad had to be buried under bullets and shelling right in the garden, along with two dogs who also died.’
The family then fled to a bunker where, from late March, they spent a fortnight. Describing their subterranean existence, Yehor says: ‘There was almost nothing to eat. We ate a spoonful of butter in the morning and a nut. And it was for the whole day.’
He resumes his explanation of his journal after a mouthful of ice cream. ‘On the third page is the war, as I see it, what I observed by myself: dead people, tanks, all sorts of destruction. Shot people, soldiers, a house burning down, people from this house,’ he says. ‘Soldiers are shooting at each other. The soldiers are shooting at some guy, who is hiding from them.’
Perhaps because youngsters Yehor’s age frequently jump from subject to subject when writing, or perhaps because it was difficult for him to focus on the horrors for too long, the following images are of his cat Kuzya and a stray puppy that the family took in during the siege.
Another shows his plans for a birthday celebration. ‘I want to go out with friends, ride a swing, play with Kuzya,’ he explains. ‘And then I drew a festive table with pizza and all kinds of delicious food.’
Olena says the diary has offered her son some comfort through dark times. ‘He probably wanted to wash away all the emotions being accumulated. He tries not to upset me, but experiences it all in himself.’
Nika, she adds, became ‘fatalistic’ about being killed. ‘When I asked her to hide during the shelling, she no longer wanted to go anywhere and said, “It’s flying all the time. Such is fate. I don’t want to run anywhere.” ’ By the middle of April, the siege of Mariupol was largely focused on the Azovstal plant, described as ‘a fortress in a city’.
As the Ukrainians repelled wave after wave of attacks, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his military leaders on April 21 to blockade rather than invade its network of tunnels and bunkers. Starved of food and ammunition, the defenders of Azovstal lasted until May 20.
Meanwhile, Yehor and his family eked out an existence. Indeed, it was not until May 30 that, as the schoolboy’s journal records, they boarded a train from the now Russian-controlled city and travelled to the small city of Berdiansk, some 50 miles away.
Recalling how they bypassed Putin’s ‘filtration camps’, where thousands of Mariupol residents were interrogated and then transported to Russia, Olena says: ‘At the checkpoint, I said we are wounded and the kids are wounded and we managed to persuade them to let us pass.
‘When we crossed into Ukrainian territory, I made a call to my family. But I got an answerphone. It said, “The line is busy, please try again.” But I almost started crying because I could hear the Ukrainian language. It was such a relief to hear the Ukrainian language.’
Now staying with family in Kyiv, Olena and her children yearn to return to Mariupol and remain hopeful that it will one day be back in Ukrainian hands.
‘The children say every day how much they miss their home and want to go back,’ says Olena. ‘Of course, we would all like to return to Mariupol. We hope that sooner or later our city will be liberated.’
Yehor agrees, despite the horrors recounted in his diaries. ‘I want to go home. I miss my old life and my school and playing with my friends.’