Survivors began to emerge on Thursday from the ruins of a theater in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, which was struck by a Russian missile the day before.
Hundreds of civilians were thought to be hiding in a bomb shelter located within the performance space. Satellite images show the word “children” was spelled out in huge letters near the theater’s front and back entrances. The Russians bombed it anyway.
Rescue workers dug through the theater’s rubble overnight despite a continued Russian attack on the city, where an estimated 2,500 civilians have died since the invasion began last month.
Dread yielded to hope on Thursday morning. CNN reports:
“After an awful night of not knowing, we finally have good news from Mariupol on the morning of the 22nd day of the war. The bomb shelter [of the theatre] was able to hold. The rubble is beginning to be cleared. People are coming out alive,” the former Donetsk region head Sergei Taruta wrote in a Facebook post Thursday.
It was not yet clear whether all those who sheltered in the theater had survived.
The Associated Press adds:
Miraculously, the shelter stood firm, officials said.
“The building withstood the impact of a high-powered air bomb and protected the lives of people hiding in the bomb shelter,” Ukraine’s ombudswoman Ludmyla Denisova said on the Telegram messaging app Thursday.
The BBC interviewed a 38-year-old woman who was sheltering in the theater with her teenage son after their home was destroyed in a Russian attack. They left the theater just days before it, too, was bombed:
Mother and son squeezed in the building’s dark rooms, corridors and halls with dozens of other families. Some women, Kate said, carried babies that were just four or five months old.
“In the beginning, it was really tough, because we didn’t have a well-organised food supply. So on the first two days, adults didn’t have any food,” Kate, who used to work at the city’s zoo shop and did not want to give her full name, said. “We gave it only to the children.”
They slept on improvised beds made with soft parts of auditorium seats which had been put together on the floor. The seats made of wood, she said, were cut in parts and used as firewood for them to cook. “Around the theatre there wasn’t enough trees we could use, and it was too dangerous to go outside”.
The AP provides additional context:
The strike against the theater was part of a furious bombardment of civilian targets in multiple cities over past day. Also struck in Mariupol on Wednesday was a municipal pool where pregnant women and women with children were taking shelter, according to Pavlo Kyrylenko, head of the Donetsk regional administration. Hours later, there was no word on casualties in that strike.
To the north, at least 53 people were brought to morgues over the past 24 hours in the city of Chernihiv, killed amid heavy Russian airtrikes, artillery bombardment and ground fire, the local governor Viacheslav Chaus told Ukrainian TV on Thursday. Ten people were killed while lining up for bread in the city, the Ukrainian General Prosecutor’s Office said Wednesday. Russia has denied involvement.
