The BBC also spoke with 27-year-old locksmith Vladyslav. Like Radionova, he was near the main entrance at the time of the attack. He immediately fled to a cellar, came out ten minutes later where “terrible things” were going on. He saw people with open fractures and a mother searching for her children under the rubble. “A five-year-old boy yelled, ‘I don’t want to die.’ It was heartbreaking.”
The BBC has had experts analyze the bombing. They concluded that the theater may have been destroyed by one bomb; a laser-guided KAB-500L weighing more than 500 kilos. It is possible that the bomb exploded immediately on impact, preventing it from drilling into the building and leaving the air-raid shelters intact.
Almost a week later, much is still unclear about the attack on the theater. At least 1000 people are said to have sheltered in the building. The mayor of Mariupol reported a day later that 130 people had been rescued from the theater. Then there were reports that many may have survived the bombing, but there was no definitive confirmation of that news.
Hardly any information
Hardly any information comes out of the besieged city. Yesterday it was announced that the two AP journalists who were the only international journalists still reporting on the battle for Mariupol have left the city; it had become too dangerous and they had to be evacuated in a hurry by Ukrainian soldiers.
Mariia Rodionova stayed in the theater in a kind of lecture hall near the stage. She suspects that the thirty others in the room were killed in the bombing. It was pure luck that she wasn’t there at the time, she says. Outside, like Vladyslav, she saw many survivors emerge from the destroyed building.
The bombing of the theater sparked international shock. All the more so because the word “children” was written on the floor in Russian at the front and back of the theater, so that pilots could see from the air that children were hiding there.
Russia denies carrying out the airstrike and says the Azov Battalion, the far-right militia that recaptured Mariupol from pro-Russian rebels years ago, is responsible. There is no evidence for that claim.
Drone footage of a recent bombing of an industrial complex in Mariupol. According to the Ukrainians, the image shows that the Russians are bombing the city indiscriminately:
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