(Sorry for the lack of updates; it’s been a tiring week for some reason.)

While Mariupol has been holding out valiantly for well over a month, I think that it will soon be fully under Russian control. For quite a while, the forces there had been taking advantage of hole in the Russian lines that allowed helicopters to bring supplies to the troops there and remove their wounded. Unfortunately, a couple weeks ago the Russians finally found that hole and closed it up, shooting down a couple helicopters in the process. Without continuing resupply, it’s only a matter of time until the Ukrainian forces are overwhelmed. And the Russians are throwing everything they can at the city to make that happen.

I fully hope and expect that to be a short-lived victory for the Russians, but it will give them one of the propaganda points they’ve been hoping for. Weeks ago, Viktoria had read something (she reads a lot of stuff that I never see) that Putin had been expecting to have a grand parade in Kyiv on May 9. May 9 is Victory Day in Russia and several other former Soviet countries, marking the surrender of Germany in WWII and the occupation of Berlin by Russian forces. The symbolism Putin hoped to have with a parade in Kyiv on that day should be obvious. It looks like they’ve going to try to make do with Mariupol instead.

Parading past all the rubble won’t be a good look, so occupying forces have started coercing remaining civilians to get things cleaned up. This is word (translated below, with light editing) coming from the City Council Telegram channel; I haven’t yet seen the information reported elsewhere:

Does the Gulag live?
Auschwitz - can we repeat it?
Putin, a stale follower of Hitler and Stalin, is realizing his perverted dreams in Mariupol. Genocide, crematoria, ghettos, and now the Gulag. We see it all in the city right now. It became known about the next innovation of the occupiers. Now residents can get food if they pass labor duty at the cleaning of the rubble. The Rashists ["Russian fascists"] are holding the whole of Mariupol hostage, and gradually turning it into one large labor camp.
In 1945, at the cost of tens of millions of lives, Nazism overcame humanity. But this virus of pure evil has been revived in Russia. The world has to stop it before it's too late.

This is what they’re trying to clean up and hide:

I’ll post a couple videos later, but I’ll finish now with an image that Viktoria received yesterday through one of her chat channels. It’s a picture of the apartment block with her son’s and mother’s apartments. It’s still standing, but as I noted in a previous post, there had been reports of fire. Now we know for sure. I’ve indicated the approximate locations of the two apartments, Zhenya’s apartment on the left, her mother’s on the right.