There hasn’t been a lot of updates of late because there hasn’t been all that much to report. Hopefully (or not) that might change soon.

• Zhenya is still on the farm, and it’s driving him crazy. It’s still probably one of the safer parts of Ukraine, and if it were up to me, I’d tell him to stay there and make the best of it until, hopefully, all this is over. But I don’t know if that’s going to happen. Zhenya doesn’t like farm life, and Viktoria is convinced he’s just seconds away from being thrown into the Army and sent to the front lines. Something’s likely to give at some point; I don’t know what and I don’t know when, but I think it’s coming.
• Katya 2 and Vanya are still in Vienna. Although they’ve both gotten their approvals to go to Canada, there was a typo on Katya’s visa and that needs to be fixed before they can go anywhere. This is having the secondary effect of delaying the travel permit that Vanya needs, because it may turn out that Katya will need one as well, and it would make sense to get that all done at the same time. The Canadian immigration service might not be quite as bad as the US one, but it’s still taking quite a bit of time. (It took a month for Katya’s original approval, and now it’s been at least three weeks since we initially told them about the typo. Ugh.)
• Artem was able to talk to Zhenya briefly about a week ago. He, his mother Katya 1 and her new husband are still in the Mariupol area, which means they’re scraping by somehow. Still no running water, consistent electricity or communications. But Artem did get a new phone number (the Russian/DPR phone service Phoenix is the only one that operates in the area now), and relayed that to Zhenya.
• Viktoria heard from her long-time friend Angela, whom I’ve mentioned once or twice. She and her husband had taken refuge in a costal town on the eastern/Russian side of Mariupol, but have now returned to Mariupol itself. I didn’t hear all the details from Viktoria, who herself probably didn’t get all the details. (They didn’t talk, it was just a message of some kind.) Sadly, it sounds like Angela is a Russia/DPR booster, which is really too bad. Angela is a nice and bubbly person (I’d met her a couple times), so to hear that she swallows the bilge coming from Russia is disappointing.
• Sadly, there’s still been no news about Viktoria’s sister Inna. V had tried looking at the DPR site she’d found back in March (the one that had said Inna had received some humanitarian assistance), but there was nothing helpful there. There was an entry from sometime in April, but V felt it was the same information as before, just with a different date. (Even if it was new information, it would still have been about two months old, so not really helpful.) I don’t think V’s given up hope yet, but there’s not much to go on. As is too often the case, it’s the not knowing that makes this hard.

For other family and friends, there hasn’t been any new word one way or another. And for the foreseeable future, I don’t really think the “no news is good news” maxim will necessarily apply. All fingers will need to remain crossed.