My apologies for not posting lately; it’s been busy in real life and, as I’ve noted before, I focus primarily on the stuff happening in and around Mariupol (Viktoria’s home town), and there’s just not much to say from there. However, there’s been some broader news of late that really warrants some attention.

The post title isn’t really a new development. Ukraine has been fighting back since the very beginning and has been doing pretty well despite the overwhelming numbers of everything that’s been thrown at them by Russia. Recently, though, Ukraine has started taking the fight to Russia instead of just being on the defensive. Over the past year, Ukraine has been getting weapons and training from a variety of countries, and has largely been saving that up and building their forces. For the past couple weeks, a part of that force has been pushing southward and making slow but steady progress.

One of the more interesting things is that Ukraine chose one of the more heavily fortified and entrenched areas of Russian troops to make their first push. They definitely could have picked “easier” points and gone at the Russians with greater force than they’ve shown. I’m sure there are military tactics and greater strategies at play here; I have no experience in those areas and wouldn’t even try to be an “armchair quarterback” for what’s going on. But I think it’s fair to say that only using 10% of your available forces against the densest part of your enemies defenses and still making progress is, overall, a very promising sign of what is likely yet to come.

“Fighting back” could also be pithy description for the past 24 hours in Russia. This is something that probably rose to the level of “local newscast reporting” for most places in the US, so I won’t go into details. (Plus there’s just way too much background that would need to be covered.) But there was a little semi-coup staged against Putin and/or the Ministry of Defense (it depends on who is doing the reporting) wherein the leader of a private military group fighting in Ukraine says he was attacked by Russian regular forces, so he marched a bunch of his forces back into Russia, taking over parts of a couple cities and saying he was heading to Moscow to free the Russian people from something. It was all very dramatic but didn’t amount to much of anything. The dictator from Belarus (one of Putin’s puppets) is said to have brokered a deal to allow the military group leader to hang out in Belarus, his troops to return to Ukraine and be merged into the regular army and everyone just kind of pretend that nothing happened and Putin is still a strong leader. Who knows if that’s the real story and what’s going to happen from here. But it did make for an exciting few hours.

Back to the Ukrainian offense and how it might pertain to Mariupol. As I noted, Ukraine is pushing southward, heading toward Melitopol (see map) and the Azov Sea. If Ukraine can make it to the Azov, they will have effectively cut the Russian forces in half, cut off Crimea from direct land access from Russia (something they had wanted for years), and brought Ukrainian forces to within a couple hours of Berdyansk and Mariupol. That would be a huge gain if it can be done. And it would be a big step toward freeing Mariupol from Russian occupation.

If all that does happen, I would really hope that Russia behaves like they did last year when Ukraine broke through the lines around Kharkiv, to the north, and reclaimed hundreds of square miles that Russian forces had control over. At that time, the Russians just ran away and didn’t really put up any significant resistance. That was good, in that it spared Kharkiv from becoming a battleground (again) and suffering more damage and death like what seen during it’s initial capture. Mariupol suffered months of siege before the Russians occupied it, and it bombed and shelled repeated throughout that time. If the Russian choose to make a stand in Mariupol, the city and those Ukrainians still living there would be subject to some of the same conditions as before. I really hope that doesn’t happen.

I would be remiss not to mention the events around Kherson, even though they don’t directly pertain to Mariupol. The big hydroelectric dam north of the city was destroy, and most credible reports indicate it was done by munitions planted in the dam infrastructure by the Russia force occupying the dam. This is another story that probably made most people’s news. It has been a catastrophic event on many front. The loss of the electricity generated by the dam has impacted not only the people in the surrounding areas, but the nuclear plant upriver from the dam. The reservoir created by the dam supplied water throughout the region, including providing drinking and agricultural water to parts of Russian-controlled Crimea. The ecological damage to lands and wildlife will be felt for, but not even full known, for years. Just one more (big) thing on the list of Russian war crimes and atrocities.

I was talking with someone recently and the topic of Ukraine came up. This person said it would be good when Putin was gone, and while I agreed with that, I also said that it probably wouldn’t end the war. Yes, Putin is a despot and has driven a cult of personality in Russia for years, but the ideology driving the war is not strictly his. For years, media organizations have been driven out of business unless they toed the party line. As a result, there are few dissenting Russian news organizations, and none of them operate from within Russia anymore. Citizens — no matter which channel they watch or newspaper they read — are getting a single, Kremlin-approved narrative about the world.

If you hear the same things over and over from everywhere you look, for years, that’s going to be what you think. It’s brainwashing on a massive scale. There are still some people that feel or know that what’s happening in Ukraine is wrong — after all, there is some cognitive dissonance in saying Ukrainians are your brothers one day and then saying that they need to be wiped off the face of the earth the next — but with the authoritarian crackdown on any sort of protest or dissent, those people who might think that something should change are silenced or suppressed.

In order to keep some sort of historical semblance of cohesiveness to Russia’s view of its own greatness and everyone else’s evilness, a bi of selective editing of the past is needed now and then. A lot of Russian ego today is driven by events of the past, in particular WWII. For them, it was the Great Patriotic War (really, that’s what it’s called) and the Soviet actions and efforts are venerated to the point of it being a state religion. Well, not a religion, then at least sacred dogma. But there are some uncomfortable truths about WWII that seem to be interfering with narratives about Ukraine today. No problem, just edit the past!

Here’s a transcript of the translation from Anton Gerashchenko (who has been doing a fantastic job of translating all sort of things coming out of Russia for the past year) for those who don’t want or like to read subtitles:

Russia cannot be defeated. It is governed by an unknown power. God must be running it. Because it seemed impossible for us to win the Second World War. I mean that such a huge force was against us, the whole united West, which unfortunately is not often talked about. I do not know what is the school history program now, but in our time it was not stressed that America, England were on the side of Germany.

So, as I was saying at the outset, I don’t think it will be enough to just remove Putin from power. There are millions of people in Russia who have suffered decades of lies and distortions without any pushback. For them, the truth is what the State tells them. It’s not only Putin, it’s the whole operation that surrounds him, and there are dozens of people waiting in the wings to take up that authoritarian power once Putin leaves the scene. Unfortunately, this probably means that Russia will have to be defeated on the battlefield and have their economy crash before the ideology of Russian greatness cracks and people start to see that perhaps the stories they’ve been told for so many years weren’t all real.

Well, maybe not “new” new, since I’ve posted assorted images of Mariupol over the past year, but Google has updated the satellite images that appear in maps and on Google Earth. It’s not just a single pass and it’s not quite clear when all the images were taken, but they appear to definitely be after the invasion, and from what I’ve seen, most of the siege. This Meduza article gives some details and has a number of before/after photo comparisons: After the siege Google updated its satellite images of Mariupol for the first time since 2021. The photos show destruction on a catastrophic scale. – meduza.io

Viktoria and I were looking over portions of the images quite intently the other evening. Of course, we looked up the apartment block where her mother and son used to live — it’s the long building at the top left. (Side note: the first “diagonal” building at the middle bottom, left side, is where V and I rented an apartment during the visit to Mariupol when we had a church wedding. We’d had our state wedding maybe four years before.)

What got us going on Google Maps was that V actually wanted to see the cemetery where her mother was buried. I’d mentioned before that she’d heard that the cemetery had been damaged during the siege and occupation. We found it (V wasn’t used to locating it from above, so it took a little “calculating”), and other than some broken outer walls, there doesn’t appear to be much damage. Since we don’t know exactly when the image was taken, it’s hard to know if this is how it looks today.

We also looked up the old family house; in the image, it’s the red-roofed house in the middle. This was the house her grandparents built, where she was born and lived the first few years of her live. Zhenya lived there when I first met Viktoria, so I’ve been there and seen. In the image, things look pretty much intact, but there are some other houses — like the one a couple doors up — that appear to have hit badly.

We also found this curious building when we were scrolling around finding friends houses and such. It looks completely new, which is probably is. V tells me this was the/a police building, so I could see how occupation forces might take it over and make it one of the first places rebuilt. I’m sure that none of the photos sent to the Russian media happen to show the still-ruined building behind it (to the left in the image).

The Meduza article had a picture showing some of the cratering caused by missiles and shelling. It’s much easier to see when it’s an open field, but imagine that pattern of cratering over a city and the things that would happen to the buildings that got in the way. That’s what was done to Mariupol.

Here’s a video I’d come across a while ago; I’ve been meaning to post it, but there always seemed to be something more important to note. This, however, is the perfect context. It’s more open fields — not necessarily in or around Mariupol — that show the indiscriminate nature of the artillery use by the Russians. And while these are just empty fields, they do the same to cities. We know that they can actually target things — they did so last summer, with fairly precise strikes on the Ukrainian electrical grid — so the fact that they do this sort of random shelling means they aren’t just trying to take out an army; they are trying to destroy a country and its people.

It is a tradition (or so I’m told) that the weekend/Sunday after (Orthodox) Easter is “Parent’s Day,” though in practice it’s more like the first day of a Parent’s Week. On this day (or during the week) it is customary for people to visit the graves of their parents, grandparents and other deceased relative, during which time they will clean up the grave sites and leave small snacks (candy mostly). This, of course, is a way to honor their ancestors, but there’s a practical side to it too. Cemeteries in Ukraine are not like those in the US, which usually have programs to maintain the grounds. That’s not the case in Ukraine. At best, only a small portion of the area is maintained in any way, and those are usually the sectors with the highest profile and wealthiest grave sites. For everyone else, it’s more like a vacant lot only with grave markers.

This weekend is the weekend after Easter, and it’s the first Parent’s Day for which Rodion knew that his mother was dead. Last year at this time, we didn’t know anything. It was still hoped that Inna was somewhere and just unable to reach out to anyone; we didn’t know until much later that she had been killed by this time. Even after this news was known, Rodion wasn’t told about his mother’s death; that only happened a couple months ago. Additionally, for a long time, there wasn’t any information about what had been done with Inna’s remains. Baba Katya was very diligent, though, and was able to find which mass grave she’d been placed in and even learned which plot.

A couple months ago, Katya also arranged to have Inna’s grave site cleaned up, get a proper marker installed, and had some artificial grass laid to give the site a more dignified look. (Although Katya paid for this upfront, Viktoria was insistent on us paying her back.) Given the circumstances and the fact that most of the bodies in that grave area will never be better identified or claimed by family, this gesture makes it all the more poignant.

Although I think Rodion has been here to visit already, this was his first Parent’s Day visit. He and Baba Katya cleaned things up a bit, left some fresh flowers and put that bad of sweets there on the cross. You can’t see a lot of the area, but you can tell that this is not a well-tended (or, probably, visited) cemetery.

I’ve got to share this Twitter post. It came up in one of the larger daily collection of posts that I saw the other day (Thursday, I think), and it’s just utterly ridiculous. It’s also a little example of the sort of propaganda the Russians are creating to feed to their home audience. One of their ongoing talking points is that the Russian army in Ukraine is not only fighting Ukrainians, but NATO troops as well. Not true of course, but they need to do something to help them sleep at night.

What makes this hilarious and ridiculous are the accents. Very, very Russian, or at least some flavor of Slavic. Most people in Russia wouldn’t know a real American accent (I’m sure I have one when I speak what little Russian I can), which is why I’m pretty sure this was for “domestic consumption,” not some “a-HA!” proof Russia would try to present at the UN.

Plenty of vulgarity in this, so be warned.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

You have probably heard — or could have reasonably guessed — that Russia has sharply clamped down on independent media, protests or any perceived dissent of the war. The crack down started years ago, but really ramped up last year, even driving a Nobel-winning media company to close shop and relocate out of the country. (Most independent Russian media now operates out of Latvia.)

Given all that, maybe this article from the BBC isn’t that much of a surprise: Ukraine war: How a Russian child’s drawing sparked a police investigation (bbc.com). I think that the real surprise for me was the extreme measures being taken here. It’s a good article to read, but in summary: A young girl draws an anti-war picture, the school calls the police, who fine her father, take her from her home, and now are prosecuting the father which could send him to prison for years. A child has an opinion! Stop it! Stamp it out! Punish anyone or anything tangentially related to this inappropriate thought!

Crushing dissent is the primary way an autocrat stays in power, but when even a kid can see the truth, the autocrat’s days are numbered. (But, of course, his true believers won’t go down without a fight.)

March 16 was an anniversary of something that should never have happened, but that no one should forget when they think about Mariupol and the history of the war. It was on March 16, 2022, that Russia decided to drop two 500-pound bombs on the theater in Mariupol, despite the word “children” painted in front of and behind the building in huge, visible-from-the-air letters. It is estimated 300-600 people were killed because of that action. (Curiously, the government of Ukraine was the one making the lower estimate; the higher number comes from external, largely-impartial sources.)

I never had the opportunity to go inside, but it was a pretty imposing building from the outside:

The AP has an article with plenty of video and photos to show what it looked like last May — AP evidence points to 600 dead in Mariupol theater airstrike (apnews.com). It probably doesn’t look any better today, but since the Russians erected a huge screen around it to block view of what’s happening now, it’s hard to say: Mariupol theatre demolished ‘to hide Russian crimes’, aide says (bbc.com).

That was the injury, now here’s the insult: Putin decided to pay the city a visit. He flew in at night and drove to a few places in the dark, when a curfew was in place so that “extra” security measures didn’t need to be taken. A few propaganda photos here and there, and he was gone again. Putin drove through occupied Mariupol at night, – Russian media. VIDEO (0629.com.ua). I’m sure there was nothing coincidental about the timing of the visit.

Probably the only coincidental thing was that the International Criminal Court had issued an arrest warrant for Putin only a couple days before. While it wasn’t for his orders regarding the bombing of Mariupol or the theater, the publishing of the Mariupol City website still think the crimes committed in Mariupol will play a role: Mariupol will help Putin get to The Hague – VIDEO (0629.com.ua)

[There’s a poll at the bottom of that last article with some interesting numbers. The question is whether people are thinking about returning and/or planning to return to Mariupol. 49.9% (as of today) responded that they are still planning to return as soon as it is safe. 11.3% say they’re gone for good, and 16.7% say they’d like to return but don’t see how that’s possible.]

UPDATE (3/19/2023 9:35 p.m. PST): The BBC has some additional information about the visit: Putin in Mariupol: What the Russian president saw on his visit (bbc.com). It appears the tour included some of the most heinous crimes committed during the siege of Mariupol (the theater, the maternity hospital, etc.). The article references Myru Avenue, which is where the family apartments were located; from the map in the article, it looks like Putin drove right by the building. (Also, I think that Myru [also spelled Mira, meaning ‘world’] has since gone back to it’s old name, Lenina… at least, according to the occupiers.)

I just want to share a couple links I came across recently. Both are, I think, interesting but for very different reasons.

First up is an article from the BBC, who has been really good at documenting the war since the beginning. Although I usually post images of Mariupol, this is a collection of photographs taken from other areas in Ukraine that have suffered as well. The first photo in the article really sets the stage:

It’s a short article without a lot of text; definitely worth your time. Ukraine war: Images show devastated towns near front line

The second article is on MSN and comes from a very unlikely place: the G20 economic summit currently being held in India. As fascinating as global economics are, the title of the article almost tells you all that you need to know: Crowd erupts in laughter at Russia’s top diplomat after he claimed the Ukraine war ‘was launched against us’

Russia has had their own version of “Baghdad Bob” for a long time (remember him?) Lavrov — the “top diplomat” from the title above — not only drinks the Kool-Aid, he’s the main stockholder, chairman of the board, operations foreman and lead truck driver of the Kool-Aid manufacturing plant in Russia. How do you know he’s lying? His lips are moving.

I came across this Twitter post a day or two ago. (Putting an image of the tweet and a copy of the video here so I don’t have to link/embed it — just in case it or Twitter go away.)

It appears that most of the video bits are from New Year celebrations in the city (December 2021/January 2022). Definitely happier times.

I recognize most of the city in the scenes. That long set of steps leading down to the waterfront was near where I stayed during my first visit to Mariupol. You see a bit of the Mariupol drama theater is some of the clips; that was the site that had been marked “children,” visible from the air, that was bombed by the Russians. The holiday tree is (was) there every year, and that lighted fountain was behind the theater and a focal point of the central park. Occupying forces dug up the fountain and moved it to Donetsk, a pretty petty thing to do. (But since the invaders also pillaged or destroyed museums and ransacked individual houses for food, used clothing and appliances — the most notable being washing machines, apparently — stealing a water feature because of its pretty lights shouldn’t really be a surprise.)