On March 7, Tatiana Bland received the call she had been dreading for weeks. “They’ve hit our flat,” her sobbing mother, Svetlana, said down the phone. In a matter of seconds the place that held her childhood memories was destroyed.
Svetlana barely escaped the Russian artillery fire as it hit her Mykolayiv apartment, reducing the building to ruins and sparking a huge blaze. Some 2,900km away in West London, Tatiana “thanked God” her mother had survived but was also transfixed by grief: her mother suddenly without her home of 32 years and their belongings incinerated.
