A couple videos to lead things off. Both Viktoria and Zhenya have been networking and combing through online resources to find any information about the city and their apartments. Here’s a video from a drone of the Azov Battalion that’s been defending Mariupol. I’m not sure the circumstances of this particular incident; what’s relevant is that the building there (the big one running top to bottom in the frame) is their apartment block.

The short, white crossbars are the entrances, stairwells and elevators. Right at the top, the first one is the entrance to V’s mother’s apartment; Zhenya’s is the next one down. You can kind of see some blackening of the courtyard-side wall (you can definitely see that on the adjoining building at the top), which is indicative of fires in the building. There’s not a timestamp on the video, so I’m not sure when it was taken. (Viktoria had heard that the building to the bottom of the video was completely destroyed, so perhaps that’s not true, or this video is from before that. Or maybe there’s a bit of the building still standing. There’s not a lot of certainty with much of the information.)

Here’s another video of the apartment building, taken from the west end by someone walking by. (West would have been the top of the video above.) The first set of windows on the left (second floor, under the green taped windows) is the balcony of V’s mother’s apartment. It was closed in years ago for additional storage and living space.

Again, I’m not sure when this was taken, and while the windows are all gone, what can be seen of the interior still appears to be intact. Hopefully that’s true and will remain so. There was an interior door, between the balcony and the living room, but there’s no way to know if that’s survived or if the apartment is just open to the elements. (Given that there are a couple windows on the street-facing side, where the above fighting was happening, and those windows are probably gone, weather will be getting into the apartment anyway.)

A wider shot of Mariupol, or at least part of it. I kind of recognize some of the buildings, but can’t quite fix the location in my mind. If that turret like building on the left is one I’m thinking of, then this is looking south and the bombed theater would be just past that “spiked” building, in the center. (The family apartment block would be well off to the right.)

The article where I found the above image quotes the Azov Battalion commander, who said something quite similar to something I’d written the other day: “I think Mariupol is a matter of principle for Putin. This is the capital of the Donetsk region, if we do not take into account the temporarily occupied territories. I do not understand why he decided to fully take control of Mariupol by this method. I don’t know what he wants to prove after such destruction. I do not understand how it occurred to him to put such an order to [his] subordinates. It is impossible to logically explain this.”

This is a little late in arriving, but here’s a shot of the front of the theater/opera house that was bombed last week. I posted a non-smoking picture of it here.

Here’s a picture of Viktoria’s old apartment building; she was on the 8th floor.