‘For two hours I didn’t move’: survivor of Mariupol theatre attack tells of carnage
Drone footage of Mariupol published yesterday shows a city in ruins, its apartment blocks burnt-out shells, and clouds of black smoke rising in the distance.
The caption of the image, posted on Twitter by Oleksandra Matviichuk, a Ukrainian human rights official, said: “Mariupol now. A former beautiful city of 450,000 people who lived in peace before the arrival of the Russian army. Russians will have to answer for everything.”
President Zelensky said in a video address on Tuesday that more than 7,000 people had escaped Mariupol in the past 24 hours but one group travelling along an agreed humanitarian route was “simply captured by the occupiers”.
“The city still has nearly 100,000 people in inhumane conditions. In a total siege. Without food, water, medication, under constant shelling and bombing,” he said.
Ukrainian forces reported “heavy” ground fighting with Russian “infantry storming the city” after they rejected an ultimatum on Monday to surrender. A western official said there was evidence of Russian aircraft dropping 500lb “dumb” — or unguided — bombs.
UN relief agencies estimate that there have been 20,000 civilian casualties in Mariupol, and perhaps 3,000 killed, but stressed that the actual figures were unknown.
A woman who narrowly escaped the bomb that struck the theatre in Mariupol last week has given an account of the attack.
Mariia Rodionova, a 27-year-old teacher, had sheltered in the theatre’s basement for ten days after fleeing her block of flats with her two dogs.
She briefly went outside to queue for water. Hundreds of civilians — mostly women and children — had crowded into the grand Soviet-era building. People had written “children” in large letters on the pavement outside, hoping to ward off airstrikes.
It made no difference. Rodionova heard “a clap, thunderous and loud”, before the screams of those caught in the blast became overwhelming. “There was only rubble,” she told the BBC. “For two hours, I couldn’t do anything. I just stayed there. I was in shock.”
The former Red Cross volunteer tried to get back into the building to recover her first aid kit and help those injured, including a man who was blown against a window by the impact, his face left covered in broken glass.
She saw people clambering out of the rubble, some carrying their luggage with them. “No one knew what to do, and the area was still being shelled.”
Another witness, Vladyslav, 27, recalled a mother trying to find her children under the rubble. “A five-year-old kid was screaming, ‘I don’t want to die’. It was heartbreaking,” he said.
The next day, Mariupol city council said that 130 people had been rescued. No more updates have been given.
Among those who escaped from the city was Charlie Gilkeson, 68, a British lecturer from Yorkshire, who walked out with his Russian wife after being trapped for nearly a month. “It was just explosions everywhere,” he told the Daily Mail.
“I said to my wife, ‘That’s it, we’re going’.”
“There is no water, no food, no gas,” he added. “We had to go to the river to get water to flush the toilet. Drinking water was very difficult to find. You had to boil water on fires.”
He said people broke into shops when they ran out of food. The couple have reached the Russian city of Taganrog.
Though Ukraine and Russia have agreed humanitarian corridors for civilians fleeing besieged cities, those leading out of Mariupol have repeatedly collapsed amid allegations that Russian soldiers fired at people escaping by road.
In the end Rodionova was forced to flee on foot. “People were in panic,” she said. “No one took me in their car.”
It took her four days to reach safety in the Russian-occupied port of Berdyansk, almost 50 miles away.
The theatre attack was only the latest on civilians during Mariupol’s siege, which Josep Borrell, the EU foreign policy chief, described as “a massive war crime”.
Russian forces have been accused of striking a maternity hospital and taking hostages at another hospital.
Russia denied carrying out the theatre strike and claimed that Ukrainian troops in Mariupol had bombed the theatre themselves to frame Russia for a war crime.
Yesterday, Ukraine said that Russian troops occupying the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the country’s north had “looted and destroyed” a laboratory at the site.
The state agency that manages the exclusion zone around the plant, which was devastated by a meltdown in 1986, said that the Russians had damaged their central analytical laboratory, which processed radioactive waste.
“Russian occupiers illegally seized the newest laboratory,” Ukrainian authorities said.
The statement said that the laboratory contained “highly active samples that are now in the hands of the enemy”.
