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.

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.

A lot of Viktoria’s days are spent reading and interacting with various groups (mostly on the chat/communications app Viber) that have been set up to request or provide information about people and events in and around Mariupol. Some people post photos of family and friends that they’re seeking information about, and other post information that know about those people, their buildings, their district or what have you. Some of it is first-hand, but a lot of it is second-hand or more. Not always super-reliable, but it can sometimes be helpful.

Using information gleaned from one such channel, Viktoria found her way to a DPR (the “Donetsk People’s Republic,” a Russian-controlled and -supported gun-fetish group pretending to be an “independent country”) website with the names of people who they’ve given humanitarian assistant to (typically food). V did a search, and Inna’s name came up as having received something on April 6. Viktoria showed me the results page, but I didn’t see the process by which she got there, so it’s hard to say how accurate the information is. By that I mean, the page V showed me had Inna’s full name, but I don’t know if that’s what Viktoria had to enter to do her search. If so, the page could just be echoing that back, rather than actually looking something up. If the search just involved the last name, for example, then the results would be more definitive. If so, then Inna is still alive and in the Mariupol area, at least as of last week.

The other tidbit arrived today, but the information being relayed is from March 31. The information comes via one of the groups, from a woman that Viktoria says she knows in some manner. This woman says that she saw Artem, Katya 1, Sasha (Katya’s husband) and Sasha’s mother on March 31 in their home’s neighborhood. Information is that the mother’s house had been destroyed (or, I’m guessing, at least unlivable) and that everyone was staying at Artem’s house now. Additionally, Sasha’s father Nikolai had been killed by Russian forces as he was driving the family car; soldiers shot at the car, killing Nikolai.

It’s difficult to know how reliable either of these tidbits of information are, but that’s probably to be expected. If the information is correct, then there is some hope that V’s family (“her blood,” as she says) is surviving this ordeal.

Not much of an update, really, since information remains hard to come by.

Katya 2 & Vanya: They are in Vienna, having arrived over the weekend. Currently they are staying with the daughter-in-law (Anya) of V’s friend Tanya. Katya is working with the refugee center in the city to get less-crowded housing, and we’re working from this side on getting her application for a travel visa to Canada. In case you were wondering, Katya and Zhenya were able to find a nice home in Khmelnitsky for their cat.

Artem: No definitive word. There may have been a sighting of Artem’s stepfather on April 5 in their neighborhood, which may indicate that they family is in their house. It’s hard to know for certain; the information came from someone on one of the channels V’s been following, who had gotten the information from his daughter. Given the spotty nature of communication with Mariupol and the “friend-of-a-friend” natures of some of these Viber channels, this news is potentially suggestive but not much more.

Baba Katya & Rodion: Even less here. There’s been no direct communication or any message from people who might have seen them. If they were in a rural area outside of Mariupol, that could be part of the reason, but we don’t have any confirmation one way or another. Katya 2 did tell V that she had a couple notices on her phone that might have indicated Baba Katya trying to reach her, but that’s also non-definitive. (B. Katya calling Katya 2 doesn’t make a lot of sense, unless maybe BK was trying to see if K2 was able to get out of Mariupol. I’ll have to double-check, but I think that B. Katya had left the bunker before K2 and Vanya did.)

Inna: There’s been absolutely no word about V’s sister. Unless Inna makes contact, this might be a situation where we will never know definitively. She wasn’t in the apartment block bunker consistently, and movement around Mariupol is/was dangerous. It’s entirely possible that Inna would have been caught up in one of the forced relocation sweeps or that she willingly went with occupation forces because of the need for food and water. So, she might be living somewhere in Russia, which would probably be the best outcome that could be hoped for at the moment. But there’s been no word from anywhere one way or another, so we don’t know and can only speculate.

Zhenya: No changes for him since the start of all this. Still on a farm not far from Khmelnitsky. He helps with chores (“watching the chickens”), so likely bored but safe. I saw a post yesterday that the spring military draft was being canceled because the Ukrainian forces had enough people (just, it seems, no sufficient equipment), which would definitely ease one of Viktoria’s concerns.

Sometimes it’s hard to know an individual’s or entity’s true intent based on what’s said or done. The whole notion of “lying” being a deliberate act of specific intent, whereas we’ll give the benefit of the doubt should someone one have misspoke or been misinformed.

“The fog of war” is the benefit of the doubt writ large. In war it’s expected that military force will be directed against military force; as a species, that’s something we’ve accepted and come to expect. It’s the definition we are willing to live with. And when, in “the fog of war,” a missile hits a hospital or school, we are aghast but also question if it was a deliberate act outside the norms of war. Technology fails — it happens all the time — so maybe something went wrong and this was a tragic but unintended event.

If the enemy had said in advance that they were going to target that hospital or school, there would be no question of intent or purpose when the missile strikes. It wouldn’t be an accident in the midst of war. It would be a deliberate act outside the norms of war, and that would make it a war crime.

Which brings me back to the train station at Kramatorsk, which was hit by a missile the other day. People waiting for an evacuation train were killed and injured. A tragedy, but was it deliberate? Given Russia’s actions throughout Ukraine during this war, it’s a safe assumption that it was, but there would still be the possibility that this was a missile gone astray and that the civilians at the train station wasn’t the deliberate target. Except it was, because they told us in advance they were going to target civilians.

Here’s a photo of one of the two missiles that struck Kramatorsk; the BBC has some additional angles on it in the video found at this article. The writing on the missile is “за дете!” — or about; it’s hard to read the last character, but the first part is quite clear. That’s Russian and it means “for the children!” That was written on the missile before it was fired. Although Russia has repeatedly denied targeting civilians, when you sign your handiwork, you erase all doubt.

(Just a little addendum here to note that Russia originally took credit for the the attack until the blowback started, and then they viciously backpedaled. The US Military says that there was no doubt that Russia fired the missile. This sounded to me to be almost an exact copy of what happened in 2015 with the shooting of MH17. The Russians, a la “separatists,” initially claimed credit, but when it became clear from the international backlash that they had screwed up, the denials were deafening and utterly unbelievable. Same playbook for the train station, just a different atrocity.)

The BBC has a good write up from some Mariupol escapees. With reports of neighbors doing hasty burials of family and friends, one escapee’s description as Mariupol being a graveyard rings particularly true.

News coming out of Borodyansk is starting to suggest that the situation there might be as bad, if not worse, than what was found in Bucha. Right now, things are still in a rescue and recovery phase, and only a couple hundred people are known to be “missing,” but there’s a ton of rubble to remove and the expectations of what will be found underneath are not encouraging.

Russia continues to forcibly remove people from Mariupol. This has been going on for a while, and the reported count of citizens taken is up to 31,000. This includes taking the staff and patients of hospital #4 on the east side. (I had also read a couple reports of shelling on hospital #1 that resulted in a fire to one of the buildings and the deaths of nearly 50 people, but I can’t find a link for that. There’s so much going on, it’s hard to keep track of it all.)

After Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014 and propped up the play-acting soldiers of the so-called DPR, they took over the regional capital of Donetsk. (You might recall from that time stories about the battle for the airport in Donetsk, which had only been built in 2012.) After that happened, administrative offices and functions for the region were essentially split between Mariupol (in the south) and Kramatorsk (in the north).

I mention this because Russian sites are now set on Kramatorsk, and yesterday they hit the train station with two missiles. There were around 4000 people waiting at the station for evacuation trains, largely women, children and the elderly (because the men really can’t go places these days). Reports are coming out that some 50 people have been killed by these strikes, and more than 100 others have been wounded.

By this point it should be apparent that targeting civilians — a war crime by all civilized standards — is the entirety of the Russian war strategy. They’ve proved how inept their military is when faced by even a smaller, opposing military force, so all they’ve got is killing from afar the people who can’t fight back. And bear in mind that this isn’t the sort of bombing that was happening in WWII, where bombers flew over cities and largely indiscriminately dropped “dumb” bombs all over the place (e.g., Dresden or the Blitz of London). These are “smart” missiles being used; they are aimed and guided to their targets. This means that blowing up a train station filled with innocent people is an intentional action, not some collateral damage of war.

I’ll end with some slightly better news. Katya 2 and Vanya are on their way to Vienna; they’ll definitely be there by the time people read this. V’s friend Tanya is there in Vienna to meet them and help them out for a few days while they get settled. It sounds like everything has gone smoothly for them so far — no reports of long waits or trouble getting over the border — and it sounded like their transport van was making good progress.

Katya will be going to the Ukrainian embassy on Monday to get some sort of temporary documentation, which might be needed for her to get travel authorization to go to Canada. We’re not 100% sure. Not being there on the ground, it’s hard to know for certain what’s needed for this new program Canada set up, but it sounds like, between the documents she does have and those she can get, she’ll be able to get approved. Hopefully quickly, but we’ll see. At the very least, at least two quasi-family members are out of harm’s way.

I think I’ve mentioned before that Viktoria is using and monitoring several new groups on Viber (like a What’sApp, but more popular in Eastern Europe) for information about people and places in Mariupol. I was watching over her shoulder and there’s one group specifically for the 110 and 108 apartment blocks (her mother and son lived in 110); other groups focus on different parts of the city. When these groups first came up, they were useful to people, not just for sharing information but also for commiserating and sharing their grief and memories.

In yet another example of “why we can’t have nice things,” people for Russia have been finding and “invading” these groups, to the point now, according to V, it’s now half-and-half people with sincere interests in being there and “trolls.” (My word, not hers.) These Russians aren’t coming to these channels seeking out the information they aren’t getting from their state media channels. No, they’re coming to tamp down any counter-narrative to what they’ve been told.

V was telling me about how most people just deny everything. “There is no war. All the destruction is coming from the Ukrainians. They’re the ones destroying cities and killing civilians just to make Russia look bad. Everyone in Ukraine is a Nazi or under the control of Nazis which is just as bad.” One post yesterday was from a woman who was taking that line, but added that if there were any bombings in Ukraine by the Russian military, it would have been done so with pinpoint accuracy.

There have already been official denials about the atrocities discovered in Bucha and elsewhere. Russia is claiming that they couldn’t have done it because they left the area on March 31 and the pictures didn’t start showing up until the Ukrainians got there on April 2. You know, the innocence plea of a 5-year-old: It couldn’t have been me because to you didn’t see me do it. Of course, there is a lot of satellite imagery from mid-March showing much of the killing that Russians had already been doing — and not bothering to cover up. Nevertheless, just as 80 years after WWII there are still Holocaust deniers making wild, unsubstantiated claims, I’m sure we can look forward to a whole new crop of Russian and Russia-support chatterers denying what happened in Bucha.

Russia hasn’t completely finished their war crimes in, around and to the city of Mariupol, but has already moved on to creating new war crimes in other parts of Ukraine.

The videos and comments from survivors of Mariupol seem to be definite proof of the targeting of civilians and non-military targets, which constitute war crimes. The blockade of the city and seemingly single-minded goal of total eradication of the city and its populace is nigh on genocide. (In case you’ve forgotten, here’s a compilation video of some of what’s been happening to Mariupol. It’s not a pretty picture.) There’s been an estimated 5000 people killed in Mariupol, including 300 just in the theater bombing. Those are just guesses, of course; the real numbers may not be know for a while, if ever. On top of these, thousands of people have been forcibly relocated to Russia. They just round up people — by force and by trickery — bus them off to filtration camps, reportedly take any Ukrainian documentation they might have, and then send them off to different parts of Russia. This is utterly consistent with what the Nazis did to Ukrainian populations during WWII. (Apparently some deportees have since managed to escape Russia to Estonia, which is somewhat heartening.)

Now, in new atrocities, the Russians appear to be setting up to do the same thing to Melitopol as they’ve been doing to Mariupol. (Maybe they’re confused — or enraged — because the names of the two cities are similar.) Melitopol has been getting shelled quite often, and evacuations have been going on for a little while. That’s better than the treatment of Mariupol, so Russia decided to step things up. There are now reports that they’ve begun to blockade the city, according to a post on the “Flash” alert Viber channel. (Sorry, I can’t link to that.) People aren’t going to be allow to leave the city and humanitarian aid will likely not be coming in. I will update and link to this information as soon as I can. If this blockade is being enacted in the manner that it’s been for Mariupol, there will probably start to be similar stories coming from that city and region as well.

The real story, however, is coming from Bucha, Irpin and similar areas that the Russians have retreated from, where such horrific crimes are being found that it is truly hard to wrap one’s mind around it. I’m a pretty stoic person, but the pictures and descriptions of these scenes has even affected me. Mass graves, civilian executions (“gang-land style”), trying to burn the evidence of their rape and murder. Here’s a link to one story with some tamer pictures. I imagine that the soldiers finding all this are as aghast as those WWII soldiers who liberated the Nazi concentration camps were. And Russia managed to do it all in just a couple weeks.

It’s barely worth mentioning in light of the above, but even the looting is nauseating. I saw one video where soldiers were looking over a destroyed or abandoned transport, and they were finding and pointing out the clothing, toys, basic household items (like a skillet sitting in the mud) that these Russia forces were taking. Here’s more on the extent of the looting. I was even reading last night of “bazaars” appearing in Gomel, Belarus — one of the cities where Russia has been congregating and staging its equipment — with looted Ukrainian merchandise being offered for sale. Russian soldiers trying to supplement their pitiful income, I guess — selling off the things they aren’t trying to get home as war trophies. I know this doesn’t count as a war crime, but it really ought to.