It 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 diary in Mariupol as the city fell to cut off Russian forces.

Holed up for weeks in a cellar with his family, the little boy kept himself busy by filling in the pages of his little blue notebook, with an idyllic image 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 escaped from the town devastated by the fighting with his mother and sister.

The family managed to reach Zaporizhia, 225 kilometers northwest of Mariupol - a town in territory under Ukrainian control.

"I have a back injury, the skin is torn off. My sister is hit in the head and my mom tore her hand muscles and has a hole in her leg", reads this little blond again from a page from his diary.

"Everyone was crying" 

We also recognize through the pages 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.

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.

Iegor'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 the capital, Kyiv, in a few days.

With AFP

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