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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.