The war is just shy of that milestone as I begin this post, but since I doubt it will end in the next couple days, I doubt I will need to change the headline. It’s been a while since I posted a family update, and since there’s been little bits of news over the past few weeks, this seems like an appropriate occasion for it.

Here’s some recent video from Mariupol, which is something of a rarity these days. I’m not sure exactly when it was taken — it was posted online just a couple days ago — but it was taken diagonally across from (and gives a good view of) the family apartment block. The big building on the corner as the video begins is where Viktoria’s mother’s and son’s apartments were located. Her mom’s apartment was on that corner, just above the shop level of the building, so technically you can see what’s left of the balcony. As the video pans around, the yellow building was a supermarket; just behind it was a restaurant where we all went when I was last there. The tall while building to the right of the supermarket was a medical clinic. Off to the right of the medical building was a secondary bus terminal; Viktoria and I would walk there to get the bus to Berdyansk. The video also pans through, what is now, a typical Mariupol apartment. No outer wall, complete rubble inside. It appears that this particular building hadn’t been in a fire.

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We recently past a sad anniversary — one year since Inna‘s death in Mariupol. I honestly don’t know how accurate the accounting is on that, given what was going on at the time, but her death was recorded as being on March 24th. Since then, as noted in a previous post, Baba Katya was able to track down her burial site to one of the nearby mass graves, and in January, she paid (we reimbursed her) to have Inna’s grave site cleaned up and decorated with some fake grass. Viktoria showed me a picture (I’ll try to post it at some point); it looks nice(r) but a bit incongruous with the all the barren grave sites surrounding it.

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A bit of news from Baba Katya and Rodion: They are both doing reasonable well, given that they’re living under an occupation. Around the one-year anniversary of the war (February 24), Katya finally told Rodion that his mother was dead. It seems hard to believe that she would have kept that news from him for so long, especially when she’d known what had happened for several months, but maybe she wanted him to have some hope to help get through the difficult times. I really don’t know. But since things were relatively stable, and with the one-year mark of the war, I think it was getting harder to maintain of pretense of waiting for some sort of news.

It seems that all the time they’d spent sheltering in the apartment block basement has caused a lingering medial issue with Rodion. I don’t have all the details, but it sounds like he will need to have a little surgery at some point in the near future. Katya is doing OK, but has trouble with her knees from time to time. That was true before the war (she had lived in a 5-story apartment building that didn’t have an elevator), but I’m sure the current conditions aren’t making things any better.

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Viktoria had the opportunity to talk and/or chat with Artem a few weeks back. You’d think that would be a cause for some happiness, but it wasn’t a pleasant conversation. Artem was very angry with his father (Zhenya) for running away. He didn’t have the whole story (how Zhenya had plans for visiting Austria and was on the train when the war started; he didn’t leave on one of the few evacuation trains out of Mariupol), and I don’t think he was particularly mollified when Viktoria filled him in. He’s been attending the Russian-run schools (it’s mandatory), so he’s been hearing a lot of the propaganda that they’re feeding the students. He Viktoria how American kindergartens were teaching children to be gay, and was critical of Viktoria for “selling out” in some way. It was rather hard to get the exact story from Viktoria, because she was clearly upset by the conversation. While teenagers are typically moody and rebellious, merging that with being in a war, under occupation and being subjected to state-sponsored propaganda 24/7 likely makes for a disastrous result. (I don’t want to worry Viktoria, but this apparent mindset and a year or two more of the war might actually see Artem joining — or otherwise in — the Russian army opposing Ukraine.)

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One little tidbit to wrap up this rather downbeat posting. Viktoria and Baba Katya were talking last week; they manage to connect roughly every three weeks. Usually their conversations are uneventful, but they were strangely cut off this last time. Viktoria was thinking about it — and I think she confirmed it with Katya when they re-connected a few minutes later — and it appears that everything was fine until their conversation got a little political. I believe they were talking about Artem, or schools in general, and the false narratives of the war that were being taught when their connection suddenly went dead. They waited a few minutes and connected again, and continued to talk (about non-political matters) without any further trouble.

This certainly could have been coincidence; to the best of my knowledge, this was the first and only time such an interruption had happened. But you have to remember that Viktoria and Katya both grew up in the Soviet Union and may have seen or experienced such things earlier in their lives. Also, to my mind, there are technology issues that might make such an event less likely when compared to the old phone lines. A VOIP conversation would look more like regular data as opposed to something a third-party could “listen in on.” I certainly wouldn’t say it’s impossible, especially if you’re the third-party (i.e., the Russian-run Phoenix phone and data provider that Katya has to use), so at the moment you can’t rule it out. So maybe Big Boris is listening.