Russia’s assault on Mariupol has destroyed or damaged 90 per cent of buildings in the besieged port city, Kyiv said today, as the search for survivors from an airstrike on a theatre where civilians were sheltering was hampered by shelling.
Vadim Denisenko, an adviser to the Ukraine minister of internal affairs, said almost no buildings had been left untouched by the onslaught. Most of the 400,000 residents remain in the city, he said, despite humanitarian corridors allowing a limited number to leave in recent days. “Evacuation and rescue efforts remain extremely difficult due to constant Russian shelling,” Denisenko said. “This is beyond a humanitarian disaster.”
It came as rescue workers attempted to reach hundreds of civilians who had been taking shelter in a theatre in the centre of the city that was hit by a bomb yesterday. “We hope and we think that some people who stayed in the shelter under the theatre could survive,” Petro Andrushchenko, an official in the mayor’s office, said.
He added that the building had a relatively modern basement bomb shelter designed to withstand airstrikes. “The bomb shelter held. Now the rubble is being cleared. There are survivors. We don’t know about the (number of) victims yet.”
Other officials had said earlier that some people had emerged from the ruins of the theatre. Ukraine’s ombudswoman, Ludmyla Denisova, said on the Telegram messaging app that the shelter had held up.
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In Moscow, the Kremlin foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that the allegation that Russia had bombed the theatre was a “lie”, and repeated Kremlin denials that Russian forces have targeted civilians. “Russia’s armed forces don’t bomb towns and cities,” she said.
Tetyana Ignatchenko, spokesperson of the Donetsk Regional Military Administration, said there had been 1,000 people inside the Mariupol theatre a week ago. “But after that, many people were able to escape. We can’t say exactly how many people were in the theatre. We can only assume 400-500. Half of them.”
Lesia Vasylenko, a Ukrainian MP on a delegation to London, said in a tweet: “War Day 22 — Mariupol will be no more. 80-90 per cent of the city bombed or damaged somehow.”
There were definitely some survivors from the theatre bombing, Serhiy Taruta, the region’s former governor, said in a post on Facebook. He wrote: “After a terrifying night of suspense, on the morning of the 22nd day of war — finally some good news from Mariupol: The bomb shelter has withstood. Rescuers are clearing the debris, people are coming out alive.”
He added that rescue efforts were ongoing and it was impossible to give the number of casualties.
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Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian foreign minister, and the city council accused Russia of a “war crime” for the “deliberate and cynical” strike.
The authorities initially said that as many as 1,200 people had been sheltering in the theatre from the intense Russian bombardment, which according to local estimates has already claimed more than 2,100 lives. The 1,200 figure was later reduced to “several hundred”.
Satellite images of the theatre before it was destroyed clearly showed the word “children” painted on the ground in front of and behind the building. It was written in Russian and would have been visible to a pilot overhead.
Yesterday President Biden called President Putin a war criminal in answer to a direct question as he was leaving a White House event. Senior US government figures had previously withheld the accusation pending official investigations into the Russian leader’s actions. The Kremlin described Biden’s comments as “unforgivable rhetoric”.
Russia denied having targeted the theatre and claimed that “Ukrainian nationalists” blew it up but supplied no evidence.
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The attack took place despite reports of progress in peace talks between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators. Russia has tabled a ceasefire deal whereby troops would withdraw in return for a guarantee of neutrality by President Zelensky, including a promise not to join Nato.
Britain and other western powers called an emergency UN security council meeting for today to discuss “Russian war crimes”.
Zelensky said on Tuesday that Ukraine had to accept it would never join Nato. However, he added that a path would remain open for it to join the European Union.
On Wednesday afternoon the Ukrainian leader addressed members of the US Congress by video, earning a standing ovation as he pleaded for more weapons, if not a no-fly zone, to protect his country. In particular, he asked for the Russian-made S300 air defence system, which Nato members who were once part of the Soviet bloc possess.
Five days before the attack on the Mariupol theatre the Ukrainian military had released a film of its interior showing it packed with women and children. “There are so many children,” explained a volunteer. “All the children have a fever, I don’t know what to do. Help us.”
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Photographs taken in the immediate aftermath of the strike showed smoke rising from the rubble. They were shared by the city authorities. The council said that the Russian strike “purposefully and cynically destroyed the Drama Theatre in the heart of Mariupol. The plane dropped a bomb on a building where hundreds of peaceful ... residents were hiding.
“It is impossible to find words to describe the level of cynicism and cruelty with which Russian invaders are destroying peaceful residents of a Ukrainian city by the sea.”
Mariupol, a city of 420,000 people near the Russian border, has been under almost constant bombardment for two weeks and has been cut off from the outside world since the beginning of the month. It has become a symbol of resistance and the human cost of Putin’s war.
Observers of the Russian military have likened Mariupol to the Syrian city of Aleppo and the Chechen capital Grozny, both of which were largely obliterated by Russian bombardment during previous campaigns.
On Tuesday the local authorities said that Russian troops had seized control of a hospital in the city, herding civilians inside as hostages, while firing from the building.
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As many as 400 people, including doctors, nurses and patients, are believed to have been taken by the soldiers. Some reports suggested that hospital windows were being used as sniper positions.
Last week the Russian military bombed the maternity ward of the hospital, killing at least one pregnant mother in an attack Russian officials described as “fake news”. The city is now encircled by Putin’s soldiers, who are slowly squeezing the life out of it.
In mass graves are children, including 18-month-old Kirill, with a shrapnel wound to the head. There is also Iliya, 16, whose legs were grievously injured in an explosion during a football game on a school field.
Their bodies are stacked together with dozens of others on the outskirts of the city. Workers throw the dead into the mass grave 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,” said Volodymyr Bykovskyi, one of the workers, as he pulled crinkled black body bags from a lorry. “Damn them all, those people who started this.”
Access to the city is almost entirely cut off, but the limited accounts from inside describe corpses littering several streets.
A humanitarian corridor to allow people to leave Mariupol and other besieged Ukrainian cities has been on the agenda at peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv.
Previous humanitarian corridors have failed amid claims by Ukraine that Russian troops fired on the agreed routes out of Mariupol.
According to Kirill Timoshenko, deputy head of the Ukrainian presidential office, 20,000 residents were able to leave the city on Monday and Tuesday, with columns of civilian cars heading for the Ukrainian-held city of Zaporizhzhya.
However, a convoy of humanitarian aid for the besieged city was not permitted to pass by Russian soldiers, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, said.
Before war came to Mariupol, its theatre often played host to performances of Pushkin, Molière and Shakespeare. It was built in 1959 in a neo-classical style. Sculptures of farmers and metallurgists, the main professions of the region, decorated its façade.
