I’m sorry I haven’t updated things of late (like a month or so). It’s been a busy time with one of the outcomes of that busyness being that… we’re in Ukraine. Despite the State Department currently classifying Ukraine as “Level 4 – Do Not Travel,” we came anyway. Viktoria needed some paperwork updated, and since she’s not a great planner, it was going to be quicker to come here to do it rather than trying to get it done through the Ukrainian consulate in San Francisco. Weird, huh?

We’ve been here just shy of two weeks and things have been going well. We’re staying with family friends a few kilometers outside of Lviv (on the western side of the county, not that far from the Polish border). In addition to paperwork, Viktoria has been visiting assorted doctors and such — things she hates to do in the American medical system, because the process is very different. I’m doing my job as normal, except with some odd hours, so I partially overlap with my colleagues’ hours back home. Our host has been most gracious and has been helping Viktoria get around (there’s a larger town just a kilometer or so away, so many things she’s been able to do there); plus, he’s lived in the area most of his life and has connections that have helped speed things along. With a bit of luck, we’ll be heading home in a couple weeks.

Despite being away from the main areas of fighting, the war is not forgotten here and is very much on the forefront of people’s minds. Last weekend (appropriately, Memorial Day weekend) we visited a cemetery in Lviv which now has a section for local residents killed in the war. Most every city, town and village has their own war cemetery; we passed several during an outing. It was starting to rain, so I didn’t even make it half-way through the rows in Lviv. Based on the graves per row, there are probably at least 1500 soldiers buried here alone. We saw some people standing or sitting near a loved one’s grave, but there were also a lot of visitors who would just walk the central lane, looking at the soldiers buried there. It’s the high cost of freedom, and I think they just need to see it up close.

We’ve listened to some sirens too, warning of missiles. There was actually a siren test happening at the little border train station when our host picked us up. Welcome to Ukraine indeed. There have been a couple other, including one last night. I don’t think there have been any actual missiles in the area, but my access to the news has a language barrier. It is possible that we heard a missile over-flight last week. It sounded very much like a jet to me, but there’s not really any air traffic these days and Viktoria says it was way too fast to have been a jet. (She was in Mariupol during Russia’s initial incursions back in 2014-2015, so it’s likely she learned the difference.) Despite this, we’re still in a reasonably safe part of the country.

So, we’ve been here for about two weeks, and it actually took us about three weeks to get here. (Kind of a vacation, but a much longer travel story for another time.) And hopefully we’ll be leaving in another two weeks. That’s a full seven weeks of travel, making it the longest trip I’ve ever been on and the longest amount of time I’ve been away from our house. I’m definitely looking forward to getting back. But that’s largely why I haven’t been able to update things of late. I’ll have to do some catch-up posts when I get home.

Technically, there’s also something with the site that I haven’t been able to address. The certificate that secures the site — necessary for the HTTPS in the address bar, as well as the little lock that shows you that your communication with the site is secure — will be expiring soon, and unfortunately I don’t have the right information to get it renewed from here. The stuff I need is either on my home computer or, because I’m trying to make security-type requests from a foreign country, I’m just not able to provide the appropriate verification needed. As a result, future visits to the site might get a warning from your browser that my site is not secure. It should still be accessible, but there might be some hoops you’d have to jump through. Don’t worry about doing that if you don’t want to; once I get home, I’ll get everything back to normal. And I promise I won’t post any urgent, breaking-news articles until then, so you won’t be missing out. Just pop your head in now and then; you’ll know when things are a-OK again.

Update: With a bit of persistence and patience (things take longer to arrive here it seems), I was able to update my site certificate. So, there shouldn’t be any warning messages or issues with HTTPS.

I haven’t posted for a while because, well, life. I recall that I’d been planning to post something in early December, but that’s when Hamas attacked Israel and that just really grabbed focus. Whatever I was going to post would have seemed petty in comparison to those events. And then the holidays came along, followed by other stuff, and really it only seems like now I’m able to find a spare moment for an update.

Despite not posting, I have been staying up on things, of course, and one of the best “quick take” things I read on a daily basis is the daily “Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment” produced by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). On their daily report (click here for the report for Feb. 9, 2024) they include some “Key Takeaways,” which provide a great recap of events; the full report then delves into each of those post a bit more. I know I’ve posted these one other time, but I thought it was time for a re-up.

Here are the takeaways for February 9th:

• The Russian online community noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin did not offer any new information in his interview with American media personality Tucker Carlson and simply repeated longstanding Kremlin talking points about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine for American audiences.
• Russian Security Council Deputy Chairperson Dmitry Medvedev noted that Putin told the Western world in the most thorough and detailed way why Ukraine did not exist, does not exist, and will not exist.
• Delays in Western aid appear to be exacerbating Ukraine’s current artillery shortages and could impact Ukraine’s long-term war effort.
• Newly appointed Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi identified several of his goals as commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
• Ukrainian actors reportedly conducted a successful drone strike against two oil refineries in Krasnodar Krai on February 9.
• Ukrainian military officials reported that Russian forces are increasing their use of illegal chemical weapons in Ukraine, in an apparent violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), to which Russia is a signatory.
• Bloomberg reported on February 9 that Ukraine is considering economic reforms in order to secure funding from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the event that the US Congress continues to block crucial aid.
• Russian forces advanced near Kreminna, Bakhmut, and Avdiivka amid continued positional engagements along the frontline.
• Russian paramilitary organization Novorossiya Aid Coordination Center (KCPN) is training drone operators in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast near Krynky.
• Russian occupation authorities continue to prepare for the upcoming Russian presidential elections by creating the appearance of popular support for Russian Vladimir Putin in occupied areas of Ukraine.

Here’s an infographic that a few sites produce (this one from Euromaidan Press) of a daily tally of estimated Russian losses. These are numbers reported by the Ukrainian Army/Defence Department and as assumed to be on the high side. Other entities use different metrics to calculate losses, which are generally more “pessimistic” because they rely more on uniquely identifiable characteristics, which sometimes don’t exist. Reality is probably somewhere in-between, which I guess would be about 75% of the numbers shown here. (That is, if a loss of 100 is shown here, the reality is probably closer to 75.) Also, please note that personnel losses are both wounded and killed.

I was thinking that even if there’s not much to be reported (as I’ve noted before, I mostly focus on Mariupol), I could post the takeaways and the infographic every now and then. I know that not everyone follows the events in Ukraine as closely as I do, so maybe it would be a handy way to help keep up, especially when there’s not that much in local or national news these days.

I waited until after Thanksgiving to post this because it’s a hard thing to watch. Recently — last week — Frontline on PBS showed a film about, as the title explains, 20 days in Mariupol. It was taken right at the beginning of the invasion. It shows a lot of what was going in those initial days — the panic and fear, the uncertainty about was happening or going to happen, and a lot of destruction and pain.

It’s definitely something people should see, but it also the sort of thing that I can’t show to Viktoria. She’s slowly getting to a better emotional state — although she still frequent curses Putin and/or the Russians and wishes them dead — and this film would be a huge trigger for her. But everyone else should see it.

Here’s a link to the trailer, to give you a sense of what’s there: https://www.pbs.org/video/20-days-in-mariupol-trailer/. And here’s the link to the full presentation:
20 Days in Mariupol (https://www.pbs.org/video/20-days-in-mariupol-x62itb/)

Quite the jump from my previous post, “600 days,” right? But I’m noting a slightly different anniversary. We’ve just passed the 10th anniversary of the protests/demonstrations that took place in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (“Independence Square”) in Kyiv that could be considered the start of all this. The demonstrations never ended and became the catalyst of the “Euromaidan” revolution. That revolution lead to the ousting of then-President and Kremlin puppet Viktor Yanukovych, the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea, the Russian support of separatist proxies in Luhansk and Donetsk (during which time Mariupol was first attacked with rockets), and ultimately, the full-force invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

I was in Kyiv around the time all this started. I wasn’t there for the first few days of the protests — they started on the 21st, and I think I arrived the 24th or 25th — but I remember walking through and around the Maidan area in those following days. (I was staying in an apartment just down Khreshchatyk Street, a nice place that provided bath slippers with their logo embroidered on.) Even fairly late at night there would be people in some sort of assembly area making speeches to virtually no one. I walked passed busses with police in riot gear parked just down the side streets near the square. I recall that it was too bad those people had to just sit in the busses for so long in that cold weather.

There hasn’t really been anything to write about for a while. The war goes on, now passing 600 days. I remember thinking/hoping back in the early days that fighting would only last a handful of months, a peace treaty would be hammered out, and life in Ukraine could begin resuming some version of normalcy again. Instead, we’re starting to see the two year mark, with some pundits saying peace won’t be seen until late 2024 or sometime in 2025.

There continues to be slow progress by Ukraine in breaking through Russian fortifications in the south, and Ukraine continues to push back Russian attacks in the east. I won’t bore you with a lot of details; if you want to see some of those details, sites like the Institute for the Study of War produces daily reports and maps showing all the movements (like this).

I will note something from the last day that gives me hope. The other day, Ukraine used their newly-received ATACMS missiles to strike the airfield the Russians set up in Berdyansk, destroying nine helicopters, along with ground equipment and ammunition. I’ve been to Berdyansk twice; it was a place that Viktoria took us on one of our first dates. I’m looking forward to seeing it liberated almost as much as I’m looking forward to Mariupol’s liberation. This strike at a city well back from the front lines means that Ukraine is getting the tools it needs to really disrupt Russia’s war-making capabilities. (In general, Ukraine has made very productive use of all the arms and equipment they’ve been given; they just need more.)

(A picture of Berdyansk from my and Viktoria’s first trip there together. We had lunch at one of the cafes here.)

Just a quick follow-up to my last post: Rodion‘s summer camp is over and he has safely returned home. I’m not sure where the information about the camp being in Crimea had come from (it may have been a misunderstanding or miscommunication somewhere along the line), but he had actually gone to a place over/down by Krasnodar. Better, since it was away from the fighting, but also potentially worse, because it was in Russia proper as opposed to an occupied area. Also, since the trip and camp appear to have been sponsored by a Greek historical group (Mariupol has/had a strong Greek heritage), maybe Krasnodar was a more cost-effective choice.

Whatever the specifics, he’s gone and back now. It sounds like he enjoyed parts of it, but definitely not everything. Breakfasts were creamed wheat (remember Malt-O-Meal?), which he does not like at all. The “fun” was very regimented — he told Viktoria it was like being in North Korea. Like many things in Russia that aren’t Moscow or St. Petersburg, things were generally run-down and not always in working order; for example, the bus bringing him back home broke down four times on the way. He said nights were cold in the camp quarters. Still, he went with a friend and sent a couple videos where he seemed to be having some fun, so I don’t think it was all bad. But he’s back home now and getting ready for school. Given Russia’s penchant for abducting Ukrainian children (Russians stealing children to destroy next generation of Ukrainian defenders – UK ambassador (ukrinform.net)), I think things turned out as well as they could.

One more quick note: this active part of the Russia’s war against Ukraine has now be going on for 555 days. Russia’s overall actions against Ukraine have been going on for over 9 years — perhaps longer, if you count Russia’s efforts to undermine Ukrainian independence since their breakaway in 1991. I continue to hope that Ukraine’s incremental gains will start to snowball and finally push Russian forces out of their country completely.

Apparently, in the past week or so there’s been an uptick in the number of mentions in Russian of a negotiated settlement to the conflict. I don’t have an article handy that I can point to, but observers see this as perhaps tacit acknowledgement that Russia knows it has a losing hand and it trying to freeze things where they are now (i.e., keep what they’ve got and stop trying for more). For well over a year Ukraine’s position has been “leave the country and then we’ll talk,” so I doubt there’s any peace treaty coming soon. I generally agree with that position. It’s as if bank robbers broke into a bank, took hostages and started cleaning out the vault, only to be confronted by a substantial number of security guards. At that point, sure it’s in the best interests of the robbers to take what they’ve already gotten and leave, but they’re the only ones who get anything. Between the Russian robbers and Ukrainian security guards, I’m going to continue to side with the latter.

There’s really not much in the way of news from the family and friends still there, I’m sorry to say, but maybe that’s as best as can be hoped for. Viktoria does talk to Baba Katya on a fairly regular basis and we are able to send them money to help out, so that’s all good. Things are still largely awful there, and that’s not likely to change any time soon. There have been a couple little tidbits that have been bothering me, though.

In a recent call with Katya, Viktoria learned that Rodion was going to be going to summer camp in Crimea. Under normal circumstances, this would be a great adventure and something that everyone would be happy about. Unfortunately, Russia has been using children as props, weapons and shields since the start of the war, and since Crimea is under occupation, it’s probably not the best place for a Ukrainian child to be. Russia has been stealing children (Invaders take 135 more children from Donetsk region to Moscow (ukrinform.net)) as a way to undermine and destroy Ukraine; it’s a barbaric tactic as old as time and a recognized war crime (Russians stealing children to destroy next generation of Ukrainian defenders – UK ambassador (ukrinform.net)). I’ve recently seen headlines of children being taken to Russia under the guise of going to camp (or other things apparently — Russia plots to use Ukrainian children as human shield in Crimea – ombudsperson (ukrinform.net)), so hearing that Rodion would be going to camp has brought the worst possible outcome to mind. Not just for me, for Viktoria too. She urged Katya to cancel those summer camp plans and hopefully that’s what will happen.

But it’s not like kids have to travel far to be impacted negatively by Russia. Viktoria hasn’t talked to her grandson Artem all that much — mostly because it’s difficult in general, and the fact that Artem’s mother is something of a Russia booster doesn’t help — but their last conversation was rather alarming. (I think I might have mentioned this in an earlier post.) There aren’t (or weren’t, during the school season) many schools operating in Mariupol, but the one that are (or were) had a very Russian propaganda-heavy curriculum. Artem was questioning why Viktoria would live in the US, as it forces kindergarten children to have sex or undergo gender-reassignment surgery, and other such outlandish claims. This is the sort of stuff he’s been hearing, and for children at an age where critical thinking skills aren’t yet well-developed, such propaganda becomes their reality.

As worrisome and disturbing as that is, there’s something else that concerns me with Artem. His birthday is coming next month and he’ll be 15 (I think). That, in addition to being rather tall for his age, makes him look older than he is. With Russia losing badly on the battlefield, they are doing everything possible to increase their ranks. I’m concerned — and would not be surprised — if some recruitment/conscription drive through Mariupol saw Artem, assumed he was 18 or so, and threw him in the back of truck for military service. Given the indoctrination he’s been receiving, he might even go willingly (though I’m somewhat sure that wouldn’t be the case, but who can know). Viktoria is always very concerned about “her boys” in Mariupol, and I’m sure she would be quite devastated to learn that Artem was in the Russian army. Again, this is all just a concern that I have; I have no reason to think this is going to happen.

Even though Mariupol is not in the news every day like it was last year for a time, that doesn’t mean that things are happening there. Little of it is good, but if you can bear it, here’s a list of some of the recent news about Mariupol: Search (ukrinform.net). Ukrinform has been one of the better sources of information about the events in Ukraine since the start of the war. I’ve generally found that they have more news about Mariupol than other Ukrainian news sources.

Over the past year I’ve occasionally seen stories about people from Russia coming to Mariupol. Many of them were about workers being brought in to do something, and then getting stiffed by the local occupation authorities. A little schadenfreude from those stories, I have to say. But what really gets my goat are the stories about people trying to profit off of Mariupol’s misery. Things like people from Russia buying property in Mariupol because “it’s so cheap” (The Russians hunting for cheap flats in occupied Mariupol – BBC News). This bothers me no end, for multiple reasons. For one, it’s Russia (or the phony DPR) selling property that doesn’t belong to them; they are, at best, temporary occupiers with no claim to the land they’re on. For another, people doing this are actively supporting the destruction of Ukraine. Even if they were to say that, for them, it’s just a great real estate deal, that’s still supporting the war. This “great deal” only exists because thousands of people were killed. That’s probably not on a sales brochure. And really, what person of good conscience could even do that? I mean, if you were looking to buy a house and found out that someone had been murdered there, you’d probably think twice about making the purchase. How could someone want an apartment in a block that was firebombed by your own country, causing deaths of the hundreds of people that lived there? It’s a mentality that I don’t think I will ever understand (not that I really want to).

There are — fortunately? — two silver linings to this story. First, most of the property being purchased doesn’t physically exist; it’s proposed or planned construction that may not come about for a long time. I’m OK with people like that (who are willing to buy the murder flats) having their money taken from them. (I sure some of the money goes to support Russia’s war machine, but I’m sure a lot of it just disappears thanks to Russian corruption.) The second is that when Ukraine resumes control of Mariupol, any such property claims probably won’t be honored. Ukraine has records of who owned what (and I’m sure that many of the people who fled the city still have their deeds and other paperwork), and that ownership will definitely take precedence over any claims from Russian carpetbaggers. So lose-lose for them. (Sorry, more schadenfreude.)

It’s been a slog in Ukraine for the past few months. Not that things were rainbows and cupcakes before, of course. But for the past 2-3 months Ukraine has been going on the offense in many areas. Last year, right after Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine was definitely in a defensive posture, just working to keep Russia at bay. And they did a great job. Then later in the year and again earlier this year, they managed to have some significant successes, liberating Kharkiv in the north and the Kherson in the south. But it was still largely just playing defense.

However, after months of training newly mobilized troops and receiving millions of dollars and euros in military hardware and ammunition, Ukraine felt they were in a position to really start pushing back against Russia. They’ve been doing so for the past few months, but it’s been slow progress. The big issue is that Russia has littered the Ukrainian landscape with mines. When navigating an area that’s become a mine field, you obviously want to watch your step, and that’s what Ukraine is doing. They are advancing, despite the mines and the entrenched defense Russia has had time to build, but it’s nothing like the rapid advances they had last year.

While I feel for Ukraine as a whole for going through all this turmoil and destruction, I feel particularly sorry for Kherson. My heart is first and foremost with Mariupol, but Kherson has had something of a bad break too. (And our neighbor’s family is from Kherson, so there’s that connection too.) Kherson is a large city just north of the Crimean peninsula, and when Russia started the war, forces from Crimea came north and took the city. They were able to do this because the leadership in the city had been collaborating with the Russians and essentially just handed the city over to them when they arrived. This was not a popular action with a lot of the population and there were protests and resistance. But largely the city escaped the destruction that places like Mariupol, Kharkiv and other towns saw in eastern Ukraine.

That situation changed after Russia was driven out of Kherson. Not being a Russia-controlled city anymore, it became another target for Russia’s frequent missile and drone attacks. It was essentially the first time in a year that the people of Kherson actually had to see and experience what so many other parts of their country had seen. That must have been very weird for some people. They’d heard stories of the destruction in other cities, I’m sure, but now — late into the war — they were finally seeing it first-hand.

When I was first coming to know Ukraine and its people, I would sometimes have encounters or hear stories about some people — usually older adults — who longed for a return to the Soviet times. Our knowledge of that time tells us that it was corrupt and difficult time and that existent for a lot of people meant low wages, “bread lines” and other privations. Why would people want that? Well, they wanted it because that’s what they understood; the devil they knew, as it were. They may not have lived well, but the lived and they knew how to work the system in order to keep on living. I sometimes wonder if the citizens of Kherson are going through a similar phase now. For the first part of the war, they were under occupation and had to submit to degrading edicts and resource shortages. But maybe that was better than a missile taking out the local school or part of an apartment block? Maybe there are some that are longing for those “peaceful” days of occupation.