As noted yesterday, I had a couple videos of Mariupol to share. But first, I invite you to see again what a pleasant place Mariupol was before the Russians came. Here’s a link to some photos on the Mariupol city website; I’d posted in back in 2014, but the link still works. I’d first visited Mariupol in the late-summer/fall of 2011, so I saw many of the same things as are in those images. The apartment where I stayed was right across from that archway — the gateway to the city park — seen in that second image.

This isn’t my video, but since I posted a picture of the Mariupol port, I thought it might be nice to re-post a video of the port from 2016. It’s just advertising, but it shows what the port was (and you can see some of Mariupol in the background).

And now for some less pleasant, but important, views of the city.

From CBS, video of the theater that was bombed. An estimated 900-1000 people had been sheltering here, and about 300 are presumed to have been killed by the bombing.

From Reuters, some scenes of the city, including some views from inside the (less destroyed parts of the ) theater.

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Two “pluses” to add. First, we are just about to submit Katya’s and Vanya’s applications for the Canadian emergency travel/visa program. Although is a special program and certain “normal” visa documentation is not being required, it still uses the same online form and process to make the request, so it’s been a bit of a trick to get everything in the right way. Plus the form is in English (and French), and since I’m the only native speaking in the bunch…

Second, I saw someone’s twitter post (embedded somewhere) that put the situation in Ukraine very succinctly:

It's simple: If Russia stops fighting, the war is over. If Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine is over.