Russian forces bombed a theater in Mariupol where hundreds of civilians were sheltering, said the local city council on Wednesday.
The council wrote on its Telegram channel that Russia had “purposefully and cynically destroyed the Drama Theater in the heart of Mariupol. The plane dropped a bomb on a building where hundreds of peaceful Mariupol residents were hiding.”
The Telegram post included a picture of the theater’s ruins. It continued, “It is still impossible to estimate the scale of this horrific and inhumane act, because [Russian forces] continues to shell residential areas. It is known that after the bombing, the central part of the Drama Theater was destroyed, and the entrance to the bomb shelter in the building was destroyed.”
“It is impossible to find words that could describe the level of cruelty and cynicism with which the Russian occupiers are destroying the civilian population of the Ukrainian city by the sea. Women, children, and the elderly remain in the enemy’s sights. These are completely unarmed peaceful people,” the post said.
Petro Andriushchenko, an adviser to mayor of Mariupol, estimated that over a thousand people were hiding in the theater. “The probability of getting there to dismantle the rubble is low due to constant shelling and bombing of the city,” he said.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, a regional administrator in Mariupol, wrote on Facebook that “The Russians are already lying, [claiming] that the headquarters of the Azov Regiment was there. But they themselves are well aware that there were only civilians.” The Azov Regiment is nationalist group that has been incorporated into Ukraine’s resistance.
Mariupol has been pummeled by indiscriminate missile attacks for well over week. A moving Associated Press report describes the horrific human toll:
The bodies of the children all lie here, dumped into this narrow trench hastily dug into the frozen earth of Mariupol to the constant drumbeat of shelling.
There’s 18-month-old Kirill, whose shrapnel wound to the head proved too much for his little toddler’s body. There’s 16-year-old Iliya, whose legs were blown up in an explosion during a soccer game at a school field. There’s the girl no older than 6 who wore the pajamas with cartoon unicorns, among the first of Mariupol’s children to die from a Russian shell.
They are stacked together with dozens of others in this mass grave on the outskirts of the city. A man covered in a bright blue tarp, weighed down by stones at the crumbling curb. A woman wrapped in a red and gold bedsheet, her legs neatly bound at the ankles with a scrap of white fabric. Workers toss the bodies in as fast as they can, because the less time they spend in the open, the better their own chances of survival.
“The only thing (I want) is for this to be finished,” raged worker Volodymyr Bykovskyi, pulling crinkling black body bags from a truck. “Damn them all, those people who started this!”
