I waited until after Thanksgiving to post this because it’s a hard thing to watch. Recently — last week — Frontline on PBS showed a film about, as the title explains, 20 days in Mariupol. It was taken right at the beginning of the invasion. It shows a lot of what was going in those initial days — the panic and fear, the uncertainty about was happening or going to happen, and a lot of destruction and pain.

It’s definitely something people should see, but it also the sort of thing that I can’t show to Viktoria. She’s slowly getting to a better emotional state — although she still frequent curses Putin and/or the Russians and wishes them dead — and this film would be a huge trigger for her. But everyone else should see it.

Here’s a link to the trailer, to give you a sense of what’s there: https://www.pbs.org/video/20-days-in-mariupol-trailer/. And here’s the link to the full presentation:
20 Days in Mariupol (https://www.pbs.org/video/20-days-in-mariupol-x62itb/)

Quite the jump from my previous post, “600 days,” right? But I’m noting a slightly different anniversary. We’ve just passed the 10th anniversary of the protests/demonstrations that took place in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (“Independence Square”) in Kyiv that could be considered the start of all this. The demonstrations never ended and became the catalyst of the “Euromaidan” revolution. That revolution lead to the ousting of then-President and Kremlin puppet Viktor Yanukovych, the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea, the Russian support of separatist proxies in Luhansk and Donetsk (during which time Mariupol was first attacked with rockets), and ultimately, the full-force invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

I was in Kyiv around the time all this started. I wasn’t there for the first few days of the protests — they started on the 21st, and I think I arrived the 24th or 25th — but I remember walking through and around the Maidan area in those following days. (I was staying in an apartment just down Khreshchatyk Street, a nice place that provided bath slippers with their logo embroidered on.) Even fairly late at night there would be people in some sort of assembly area making speeches to virtually no one. I walked passed busses with police in riot gear parked just down the side streets near the square. I recall that it was too bad those people had to just sit in the busses for so long in that cold weather.

There hasn’t really been anything to write about for a while. The war goes on, now passing 600 days. I remember thinking/hoping back in the early days that fighting would only last a handful of months, a peace treaty would be hammered out, and life in Ukraine could begin resuming some version of normalcy again. Instead, we’re starting to see the two year mark, with some pundits saying peace won’t be seen until late 2024 or sometime in 2025.

There continues to be slow progress by Ukraine in breaking through Russian fortifications in the south, and Ukraine continues to push back Russian attacks in the east. I won’t bore you with a lot of details; if you want to see some of those details, sites like the Institute for the Study of War produces daily reports and maps showing all the movements (like this).

I will note something from the last day that gives me hope. The other day, Ukraine used their newly-received ATACMS missiles to strike the airfield the Russians set up in Berdyansk, destroying nine helicopters, along with ground equipment and ammunition. I’ve been to Berdyansk twice; it was a place that Viktoria took us on one of our first dates. I’m looking forward to seeing it liberated almost as much as I’m looking forward to Mariupol’s liberation. This strike at a city well back from the front lines means that Ukraine is getting the tools it needs to really disrupt Russia’s war-making capabilities. (In general, Ukraine has made very productive use of all the arms and equipment they’ve been given; they just need more.)

(A picture of Berdyansk from my and Viktoria’s first trip there together. We had lunch at one of the cafes here.)

Just a quick follow-up to my last post: Rodion‘s summer camp is over and he has safely returned home. I’m not sure where the information about the camp being in Crimea had come from (it may have been a misunderstanding or miscommunication somewhere along the line), but he had actually gone to a place over/down by Krasnodar. Better, since it was away from the fighting, but also potentially worse, because it was in Russia proper as opposed to an occupied area. Also, since the trip and camp appear to have been sponsored by a Greek historical group (Mariupol has/had a strong Greek heritage), maybe Krasnodar was a more cost-effective choice.

Whatever the specifics, he’s gone and back now. It sounds like he enjoyed parts of it, but definitely not everything. Breakfasts were creamed wheat (remember Malt-O-Meal?), which he does not like at all. The “fun” was very regimented — he told Viktoria it was like being in North Korea. Like many things in Russia that aren’t Moscow or St. Petersburg, things were generally run-down and not always in working order; for example, the bus bringing him back home broke down four times on the way. He said nights were cold in the camp quarters. Still, he went with a friend and sent a couple videos where he seemed to be having some fun, so I don’t think it was all bad. But he’s back home now and getting ready for school. Given Russia’s penchant for abducting Ukrainian children (Russians stealing children to destroy next generation of Ukrainian defenders – UK ambassador (ukrinform.net)), I think things turned out as well as they could.

One more quick note: this active part of the Russia’s war against Ukraine has now be going on for 555 days. Russia’s overall actions against Ukraine have been going on for over 9 years — perhaps longer, if you count Russia’s efforts to undermine Ukrainian independence since their breakaway in 1991. I continue to hope that Ukraine’s incremental gains will start to snowball and finally push Russian forces out of their country completely.

Apparently, in the past week or so there’s been an uptick in the number of mentions in Russian of a negotiated settlement to the conflict. I don’t have an article handy that I can point to, but observers see this as perhaps tacit acknowledgement that Russia knows it has a losing hand and it trying to freeze things where they are now (i.e., keep what they’ve got and stop trying for more). For well over a year Ukraine’s position has been “leave the country and then we’ll talk,” so I doubt there’s any peace treaty coming soon. I generally agree with that position. It’s as if bank robbers broke into a bank, took hostages and started cleaning out the vault, only to be confronted by a substantial number of security guards. At that point, sure it’s in the best interests of the robbers to take what they’ve already gotten and leave, but they’re the only ones who get anything. Between the Russian robbers and Ukrainian security guards, I’m going to continue to side with the latter.

There’s really not much in the way of news from the family and friends still there, I’m sorry to say, but maybe that’s as best as can be hoped for. Viktoria does talk to Baba Katya on a fairly regular basis and we are able to send them money to help out, so that’s all good. Things are still largely awful there, and that’s not likely to change any time soon. There have been a couple little tidbits that have been bothering me, though.

In a recent call with Katya, Viktoria learned that Rodion was going to be going to summer camp in Crimea. Under normal circumstances, this would be a great adventure and something that everyone would be happy about. Unfortunately, Russia has been using children as props, weapons and shields since the start of the war, and since Crimea is under occupation, it’s probably not the best place for a Ukrainian child to be. Russia has been stealing children (Invaders take 135 more children from Donetsk region to Moscow (ukrinform.net)) as a way to undermine and destroy Ukraine; it’s a barbaric tactic as old as time and a recognized war crime (Russians stealing children to destroy next generation of Ukrainian defenders – UK ambassador (ukrinform.net)). I’ve recently seen headlines of children being taken to Russia under the guise of going to camp (or other things apparently — Russia plots to use Ukrainian children as human shield in Crimea – ombudsperson (ukrinform.net)), so hearing that Rodion would be going to camp has brought the worst possible outcome to mind. Not just for me, for Viktoria too. She urged Katya to cancel those summer camp plans and hopefully that’s what will happen.

But it’s not like kids have to travel far to be impacted negatively by Russia. Viktoria hasn’t talked to her grandson Artem all that much — mostly because it’s difficult in general, and the fact that Artem’s mother is something of a Russia booster doesn’t help — but their last conversation was rather alarming. (I think I might have mentioned this in an earlier post.) There aren’t (or weren’t, during the school season) many schools operating in Mariupol, but the one that are (or were) had a very Russian propaganda-heavy curriculum. Artem was questioning why Viktoria would live in the US, as it forces kindergarten children to have sex or undergo gender-reassignment surgery, and other such outlandish claims. This is the sort of stuff he’s been hearing, and for children at an age where critical thinking skills aren’t yet well-developed, such propaganda becomes their reality.

As worrisome and disturbing as that is, there’s something else that concerns me with Artem. His birthday is coming next month and he’ll be 15 (I think). That, in addition to being rather tall for his age, makes him look older than he is. With Russia losing badly on the battlefield, they are doing everything possible to increase their ranks. I’m concerned — and would not be surprised — if some recruitment/conscription drive through Mariupol saw Artem, assumed he was 18 or so, and threw him in the back of truck for military service. Given the indoctrination he’s been receiving, he might even go willingly (though I’m somewhat sure that wouldn’t be the case, but who can know). Viktoria is always very concerned about “her boys” in Mariupol, and I’m sure she would be quite devastated to learn that Artem was in the Russian army. Again, this is all just a concern that I have; I have no reason to think this is going to happen.

Even though Mariupol is not in the news every day like it was last year for a time, that doesn’t mean that things are happening there. Little of it is good, but if you can bear it, here’s a list of some of the recent news about Mariupol: Search (ukrinform.net). Ukrinform has been one of the better sources of information about the events in Ukraine since the start of the war. I’ve generally found that they have more news about Mariupol than other Ukrainian news sources.

Over the past year I’ve occasionally seen stories about people from Russia coming to Mariupol. Many of them were about workers being brought in to do something, and then getting stiffed by the local occupation authorities. A little schadenfreude from those stories, I have to say. But what really gets my goat are the stories about people trying to profit off of Mariupol’s misery. Things like people from Russia buying property in Mariupol because “it’s so cheap” (The Russians hunting for cheap flats in occupied Mariupol – BBC News). This bothers me no end, for multiple reasons. For one, it’s Russia (or the phony DPR) selling property that doesn’t belong to them; they are, at best, temporary occupiers with no claim to the land they’re on. For another, people doing this are actively supporting the destruction of Ukraine. Even if they were to say that, for them, it’s just a great real estate deal, that’s still supporting the war. This “great deal” only exists because thousands of people were killed. That’s probably not on a sales brochure. And really, what person of good conscience could even do that? I mean, if you were looking to buy a house and found out that someone had been murdered there, you’d probably think twice about making the purchase. How could someone want an apartment in a block that was firebombed by your own country, causing deaths of the hundreds of people that lived there? It’s a mentality that I don’t think I will ever understand (not that I really want to).

There are — fortunately? — two silver linings to this story. First, most of the property being purchased doesn’t physically exist; it’s proposed or planned construction that may not come about for a long time. I’m OK with people like that (who are willing to buy the murder flats) having their money taken from them. (I sure some of the money goes to support Russia’s war machine, but I’m sure a lot of it just disappears thanks to Russian corruption.) The second is that when Ukraine resumes control of Mariupol, any such property claims probably won’t be honored. Ukraine has records of who owned what (and I’m sure that many of the people who fled the city still have their deeds and other paperwork), and that ownership will definitely take precedence over any claims from Russian carpetbaggers. So lose-lose for them. (Sorry, more schadenfreude.)

It’s been a slog in Ukraine for the past few months. Not that things were rainbows and cupcakes before, of course. But for the past 2-3 months Ukraine has been going on the offense in many areas. Last year, right after Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine was definitely in a defensive posture, just working to keep Russia at bay. And they did a great job. Then later in the year and again earlier this year, they managed to have some significant successes, liberating Kharkiv in the north and the Kherson in the south. But it was still largely just playing defense.

However, after months of training newly mobilized troops and receiving millions of dollars and euros in military hardware and ammunition, Ukraine felt they were in a position to really start pushing back against Russia. They’ve been doing so for the past few months, but it’s been slow progress. The big issue is that Russia has littered the Ukrainian landscape with mines. When navigating an area that’s become a mine field, you obviously want to watch your step, and that’s what Ukraine is doing. They are advancing, despite the mines and the entrenched defense Russia has had time to build, but it’s nothing like the rapid advances they had last year.

While I feel for Ukraine as a whole for going through all this turmoil and destruction, I feel particularly sorry for Kherson. My heart is first and foremost with Mariupol, but Kherson has had something of a bad break too. (And our neighbor’s family is from Kherson, so there’s that connection too.) Kherson is a large city just north of the Crimean peninsula, and when Russia started the war, forces from Crimea came north and took the city. They were able to do this because the leadership in the city had been collaborating with the Russians and essentially just handed the city over to them when they arrived. This was not a popular action with a lot of the population and there were protests and resistance. But largely the city escaped the destruction that places like Mariupol, Kharkiv and other towns saw in eastern Ukraine.

That situation changed after Russia was driven out of Kherson. Not being a Russia-controlled city anymore, it became another target for Russia’s frequent missile and drone attacks. It was essentially the first time in a year that the people of Kherson actually had to see and experience what so many other parts of their country had seen. That must have been very weird for some people. They’d heard stories of the destruction in other cities, I’m sure, but now — late into the war — they were finally seeing it first-hand.

When I was first coming to know Ukraine and its people, I would sometimes have encounters or hear stories about some people — usually older adults — who longed for a return to the Soviet times. Our knowledge of that time tells us that it was corrupt and difficult time and that existent for a lot of people meant low wages, “bread lines” and other privations. Why would people want that? Well, they wanted it because that’s what they understood; the devil they knew, as it were. They may not have lived well, but the lived and they knew how to work the system in order to keep on living. I sometimes wonder if the citizens of Kherson are going through a similar phase now. For the first part of the war, they were under occupation and had to submit to degrading edicts and resource shortages. But maybe that was better than a missile taking out the local school or part of an apartment block? Maybe there are some that are longing for those “peaceful” days of occupation.

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.