A young Ukrainian boy with disabilities is now an orphan after his father was taken by cancer in the devastated eastern city of Izium.
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Bohdan's father wasted away for weeks in the corridor room of a shelter for the injured and homeless before stomach cancer finally claimed him on Oct 3. During every dwindling waking moment at the end of his life, Mykola Svyryd worried about his son. Those who didn't have the means to flee the city quickly enough cowered in its basements, surviving — but only just — without electricity, gas or running water. In early September, a Ukrainian counteroffensive swept through the Kharkiv region, sending the Russians into a disorganized retreat from Izium and other towns.
"He was born disabled. He never went to school. I taught him to read a little, to write numbers and letters," Svyryd said of his son. Bohdan embraced his father tenderly and often in the older man's last days. He whispers along with Ukrainian pop music and plays small-screen video games as avidly as any teen.
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