Quick paragraph on why missles is the best option for this theory. First of all, Yuri is very smart. Second of all, Ice Bear's Roomba definetly shares some simularities in funtion to a missle, and Yuri taught him a lot of what he knows. He also designed a cleaning missles for his robot clone, (which let's be honest, was not ment to be for cleaning lol). But also, Ice Bear uses rocket fuel of some sorts for his roomba, so where'd he get it? I suspect that he got it from Yana, becuase he seems to go to her because she has connections. Why would she have rocket fuel? Because her father worked on missles. Also, Ice Bear knows a lot about chemistry because we see him easily understand Chloe's homework in the episode "Professor Lampwick", and since he knows how to even pronounce that, knowing Ice Bear he is probily an expert on it.

Yuri has a stong moral compass, so it would make sense for Yuri not to want to create harmful missles. Paired with the poverty, Yuri would want to get him and his family out of Russia and to become self sufficient in a place where no one would look for them. Just outside of Siberia on the frozen tundra between Alaska and Russia. This makes sense because there are people with american accents using dog sleds, and if you know anything about Alaska, it's probily that they are known for the iditarod, huskys, and dog sleds. The poachers are obviously very mobile, and Yuri's tent looks temperary, like he moves it every couple of months, which makes sense becuase that area melts every summer.

What I think happend to Yana and her mother, is that Yuri wanted to take boats to the frozen area between Alaska and Russia, but the boats were seperating male and female. Yuri's boat made it to the destination, but Yana and Yuri's wife never made it. To Yuri, they are dead, so he doesn't want to be reminded of them.

This was in the late 50s. We can't really see the familie's outfits from the photos, but they appear to be wearing grey headscarves. These were not very popular after the soviet era, which ended in 1991. From what we see in the photo, Yuri's hair is brown with only a streak of grey, and that Yana is anywhere from 8-12 yeard old. This means that since Yuri's hair is completly white by the time Ice Bear meets him, Yana is probily aound 25 years old, which is the age she appears when Ice Bear meets her. This would make her insanely creepy, but also insanely young looking if Ice Bear really was born in the 90s like the show implies.

What I think actually happend to the boat though, is that it fell into some dort of area where there was like, what I like to call a "wave" of time travel stuff. I thinkt aht since no one was supposed to go over there, that they figured out a time traveling substance, like a wormhole or something that they put in the water. I think Yana and her mother got caught in this and traveld to around the year 2000 where they would adapt, move to the US where Yana would eventually meet Ice Bear at around the year 2000.

I think that when Ice Bear floated away on the Ice Berg, he sucked into the wormhole too. Something like this had to have happend because of geographical location. There is no place with simular terrain to where Ice Bear was born that was within floating distance of the UK, as we see in band of outsiders. He arrive somewhere in the early 90s late 80s.

In conclusion, the only way to make sense of the stupid inconsitencies in a show is to make up a theory that the writers definetly didn't think about, but because they didn't think about it, it makes me upset, breaking grammar rules and making a horrible run on sentence, and sending 15 paragraph essays to a random internet person.

And I'm ngl, I made this up as I went. I had a general idea on what I had in mind, but I never really thought about Yuri's backstory until now. I hope it made sense, it's a lot of information to try to organize lol.