“After a terrible night of not knowing, we finally got good news from Mariupol on the morning of the 22nd day of the battle. Air Defense [of the theatre] was able to hold. Debris is starting to clear. People are coming out alive,” wrote Sergei Taruta, the former head of the Donetsk region in a Facebook post on Thursday.
It was not yet clear whether all those who took refuge in the theater survived.
After Wednesday’s bombing, Mariupol City Council shared a photo of the building and said that the Russian military “deliberately and reprehensiblely destroyed the drama theater located in the center of Mariupol.”
CNN has geolocated the image and confirmed it is of a theater in the southeastern port city. According to satellite images, the word “kids” was pronounced on two sides of the theater before the bombings took place.
Ukraine’s Defense Minister Olesi Reznikov said Thursday that the Russian who detonated the bomb was a “monster” and stressed the presence of children in the building.
“You probably already heard that this theater was hit by missiles, a theater where 1,200 women and children were hiding,” Reznikov told the European Parliament via video link.
“And you can see from the map, from the drone, that ‘children’ were written all around this theater so that the pilot of the bombing plane would see ‘children’, and yet, in spite of this, this monster is the theater of bombing. Of.”
Mariupol city government official Maxim Kach said the building was meant for civilians, with only women and young children hiding and not military personnel, while a government adviser said it was the largest shelter in Mariupol.