Tom Mutch reports:

Flowers bloom over an unmarked grave in Kharkiv. We never found the woman’s name, but the neighbors buried her in a shallow grave in the garden she had tended her whole life. Springtime has come to Ukraine’s biggest city, which has mostly been relieved of the agony of three months of Russian bombardment.

Galina, a 61-year-old teacher from Kharkiv, lived underground for nearly three months, but her daughter in Russia refused to believe that their city was being bombed. “You’re lying,” she told her mother over the phone from the safety of her house in the Urals, where she lives with her Russian husband. Galina had been living in her basement with her daughter-in-law and grandchildren for three weeks in a district directly on the front line. The area was contested between Russian and Ukrainian troops, so no aid could reach the shelter. And with no running water, they were forced to drink melted snow.

“When we were evacuated, I looked out the windows of the bus. I saw parts of destroyed vehicles and parts of dead human bodies,” she said before she broke down crying. “I’m sorry I can’t talk anymore about what I saw,” she said as one of the metro station’s volunteer staff put her arms around her. Galina then stared me in the eyes with a mix of tears and rage. “I can’t process how my daughter doesn’t even believe her own mother.” [Continue reading…]