I had been working on this earlier, but between the heat, bad news about Inna, and some upcoming travel, I’m not going to have time to get the rest of the content I’d wanted to include added anytime soon. I’ll just point out that Mariupol remains bad under the Russians; there’s still no running water — at least not in the remaining houses (plenty of running water down the streets when they try to turn things on); electricity is spotty at best; they are discontinuing free foot and water, and starting to require people to “earn” by clearing rubble and dead bodies; and there are long lines of people trying to get permits to leave the city. Can’t really blame them. And of course the theft of anything of value continues unabated — metal, wheat and agricultural products, really anything that’s even slightly better than what people in Donetsk have subsisted on for the past 8 years. Also, there may not be a “Mariupol” for much longer, because the Russians want to rename the city to Zhdanov, the name it had when Ukraine was part of the USSR. Because everything was better in Soviet times…

An example of what I mean: Ruins, bonfires in streets, unsanitary conditions: How Mariupol struggling to live under occupation (ukrinform.net)

Anyway, here’s what I had gotten written. I’ll have an another update once I’m able to sit at my computer for a couple uninterrupted hours.

While I care about what’s happening in Ukraine as a whole, most of my posts are about Mariupol and the people we know there. This is part of the reason why there hasn’t been a lot to post of late. It’s not that things aren’t happening there, it’s just that things have found a measure of stability. Not good stability, just stability. And things will likely remain that way until the Ukrainian army retakes the city.

Family/friends updates: There really aren’t any.

• Katya 2 and Vanya are cleared to go to Canada, but they might be choosing to stay in Vienna. They’ve been there for over three months, know people and have kind of been settling in, so the prospect of uprooting themselves again and going where they have none of that might not be all that appealing at the moment. Ball’s in their court.
• Baba Katya and Rodion remain just outside of Mariupol and it sounds like they’re doing OK. Rodion had a birthday recently and thanks to the daughter of the friend they’re staying with, we were able to send some money for his birthday. (And some cash to help them start stockpiling for the winter.) While there isn’t phone service where they are, they do have internet service, and that lets V and Katya talk on a semi-regular basis.
• Still no direct communication with Artem or his family. However, V hopes that Baba Katya will be able to locate them and establish some type of regular contact. At last report, they’re still in the northern part of Mariupol, but that’s definitely stale information.
• (Note: I did have a paragraph here about how we still had no information about Inna. I’ve removed it in light of what we learned earlier this week.)