CHRISTINA LAMB | DISPATCH
Pioneering ‘grief camps’ help Ukraine’s children laugh again
Safe from the conflict, youngsters enjoy art, football and Harry Potter. Their therapists’ work will help other children around the world
Vlad Dragun last year, aged six, next to the grave of his mother, Ira, who died of a heart attack in Bucha brought on by the stress of war
RODRIGO ABD/AP
The Sunday Times
Little Vlad is drawing a picture of himself putting money on his mother’s makeshift grave. “I want her to buy something so she is comfortable wherever she is,” he explains. Sometimes he leaves sweets.
He and his mother were sheltering from Russian shelling in a basement in the small Ukrainian town of Bucha when she had a heart attack and died. She was 33. He and his father buried her in the back yard. A photograph shows Vlad afterwards in front of her grave: head bowed, face stricken, hands deep in the pockets of his puffer jacket. He looks like the saddest child in the world.
Yet this same seven-year-old, whose story encapsulates the cruelty of war, where children are so often victims, is also
