An airstrike on the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater, launched by the Russian Armed Forces on March 16th, was a tragedy the full scale of which we are yet to grasp. ASTRA has interviewed the witnesses: some of them survived the airstrike but lost their loved ones; others had been taking shelter in the theater and left literally hours before the disaster. We’ve also found a witness who lived 100 meters from the theater and personally saw a bomb drop onto the building, as well as a woman who filmed the subsequent shooting (of the building). Her testimony was later labelled “fake news” by the propaganda.

The people we’ve interviewed insist that for the entire timespan since February the 24th there wasn’t a single member of the military in the theater, let alone a military HQ. Throughout those weeks the Drama Theater only sheltered civilians, including a large number of women and children.

Our sources estimate the number of refugees sheltered in the Drama Theater between 1000 and 2000 people. On the night of March 15th to 16th the city center where the building was located saw intensive shelling. Some people left the shelter in the morning of March 16th. However, there was still a handful of people left in the building.

Here are their stories.

A STORY OF SASHA KUZNETSOV WHO SPENT TWO WEEKS IN THE THEATER. SASHA SURVIVED BUT LOST HIS MOM

On February the 24th, a 12-year-old Sasha Kuznetsov was awakened by a call from his mother. That night Yelena Kuznetsova had a night shift at the docks: she worked as a tally clerk. Sasha picked up the call and learned that he wouldn’t be going to school that day. When Yelena came back from work, she explained to her son that a war had started. By that point they could already hear explosions in the city.

Both Sasha and his mom were sure it would all be over really soon, so they didn’t stockpile any food. They were wrong. On the 3rd day, when food started to run out, Sasha and his mom left home in search of provision. It was chaos on the streets: according to the boy, long lines formed in front of shops and ATMs; people would clean stores out of anything they could. There were even fights for expired products. Having bought bread and butter with their last money, Yelena and Sasha hurried home. Next day the power went out in their neighborhood. Phones went down the day after that.

On March the 4th, evacuation from Zaporizhzhia was announced on the radio. Sasha and his mom, like dozens of other Mariupol inhabitants, came to the Illichivets sport arena. There they waited for several hours until the police told the attendants there would be no evacuation: [they didn’t grant] a “green corridor”. On March the 5th they came there again – but once again, no corridor was opened. Then they decided to try their luck at the Drama Theater. “Because [people] thought every landmark would be a pickup point. So we decided to go there with them, but there was no [evac] there either, because Russians, once again, didn’t let the convoy through. So we stayed at the Drama Theater, just in case there are some other news,” Sasha recalls.

“I’ll admit, I was hoping to spend the first night on the seats of that beautiful warm hall where they used to have the shows, but we were told: ‘If they strike, the roof may fall.’ And when they finally shelled the theater on that ill-fated day [March 16th], I saw that chandelier collapse along with the ceiling,” the boy says.

At first, Yelena and Sasha lived in the theater’s hallway, sleeping on top of their jackets: the basement was packed full with people, and the auditorium was off-limits. Then Igor Matyushin, a member of the theater staff, ordered to unlock the administrative office, and Sasha and his mother found accomodations there: “We moved in there; this was euphoric because we could lock ourselves and get some rest. The Matyushin family, who later took me in, lived nearby. And there was another military family next door, I still keep contact with them. We all became friends, and we were helping each other. The room was tiny, but we managed to fit in: me, my mom and another man we knew. Plus, we’ve taken in a granny. Her son had sent her out to evacuate, but he stayed at home. We still don’t know what happened to him.”

Later Sasha learned there was a field kitchen at the theater, so he volunteered to help. “[They needed], say, wood chopped or some water carried. Then mom decided to help as well; she would spend all day there [at the field kitchen]. Mostly they asked me to break off some planks so that people would have place to sleep. To help carry something or board the windows”, Sasha tells. The field kitchen came courtesy of Ukrainian soldiers who brought it after learning how many people the theater sheltered. The boy says they would often bring food and medicine.

With every passing day, more and more people volunteered to help. “But some people were less kind, [like] a few young guys, 25 years old or so. Someone walks around saying ‘We need help bringing some water’. Grannies aged 65 stand up and start carrying water, and these guys are just sitting there. I found it very frustrating.” Sasha also tells that people from nearby houses came to the theater in search of food: “Many would come and say ‘I’ve got five kids’. They were given slightly more candy and biscuits.”

Each day more people would come to the theater, fleeing from the wrecked city outskirts where they could no longer find shelter. They tried to keep accounts of everyone who arrived. Sasha and his mom were among those who compiled lists of newcomers.

“Many were injured. Igor Valentinovich Matyushin’s wife set up an infirmary, and she was constantly tired. It’s just that she was my neighbor, so I saw Yelena Anatolyevna return tired every day. Not even tired, but exhausted from life. She would say: ‘I’m a doctor, I’m a medical specialist and I have to help people. Especially after all these years in retirement, I want to help people.’ She knew that no one but her could do it. There were about 10 people in the infirmary, and around 1,500 in the entire theater, by the latest estimates. And there were probably 30 to 50 doctors among those 1,500, but no one wanted to respond because there are viruses, microbes, whatever infections,” Sasha tells.

When people started realizing there would be no green corridors in the near future, and staying in Mariupol was getting increasingly dangerous, some of them tried breaking out of the besieged city. According to Sasha, either on March 11th or 13th (he doesn’t remember exactly) Red Cross volunteers organized a convoy to evacuate people:

“Two people from the Red Cross, along with policemen, decided to break through the Russian lines so that people could leave. There were 60 cars carrying both children and adults. Half of the convoy got shot, another half they let through.

At that point communications were still up in some places in Mariupol, so those who managed to escape told us about it. The news was circulating in the theater, at least.”

“There was also an incident when people from the theater left to secure some food. And that shop got shelled with a drop bomb. Half of them died, half of them returned.” This story is corroborated by Darya who was also at the theater; ASTRA features her story in a follow-up.

Sasha tells us that there was no military personnel in the theater. They only brought food and medicine. “The military brought two generators and gasoline to the theater so that we could charge phones and flashlights. They kept giving us food and their last gasoline leftovers. The military also helped us out with pharma despite needing it for themselves. I’m going to say a huge thanks to them once more, because some stores weren’t unlocked, then they broke in and people went there. There was also this incident with a sweets and liquor store. Sweets were given exclusively either to the Drama Theater, or to kids [who lived nearby]. As for the liquor store, they just destroyed it. There were many people in the theater who brought vodka from the store first, before even going for food. Well, you know the kind of people we sometimes have. If anyone was found drinking at the theater, provided this was anything stronger than beer, they were kicked out. There were also people who had stolen a hoard of cigarettes in the store, and they were charging a triple price for those. In those circumstances, I believe they should’ve just given them for free. This is war. Well, all people are different. Some gave the shirt off their back, others acted like this.”

March 16th. The airstrike

“After the first airstrike, on March 16th… Frankly speaking, I was just sitting in the room, and mom was helping at the field kitchen. I was sitting there preparing lighting for the night. I was given charger batteries, I had to insert them to check if they work and make flashlights out of those LEDs. I was sitting there, and as they say in safety orientation, “As soon as you hear a whiz, anything resembling something flying by, drop down to the floor. There was no sound like that. Just a pop. There wasn’t even a crumbling sound. When something huge drops, there has to be a huge sound. But there wasn’t, and I have no idea why.

I just saw that the windows that my team boarded didn’t help, and where those window frames fell – it was in a huge hall where normally 5 or 6-year-old kids would hang out. They [windows] just dropped down.

In the room next door, the one where Matyushins lived, a wall collapsed on the spot where her husband usually rested. Thankfully he wasn’t there. There was a family in another nearby room – they had left the day before, but their grandpa stayed behind, refusing to leave. Their dad stayed to look after the grandpa. The grandpa was so chill he just grabbed his things and wandered off. As far as I understand, later they found him. However, in a room nearby there was a family – there was a guy with a disabled daughter. And after that explosion her heart stopped.

In the main hall, where they had that huge chandelier and the stage, the ceiling collapsed on top of the people. But those who were in the topmost rows, they survived. One man I knew was among them. When I finally tried to come out to the field kitchen, there was no exit because a wall had collapsed. I saw skylight where the stage used to be. So I had to exit through the main entrance.

And when I saw a pile of cement, rubble and blood there [instead of the field kitchen]… After shouting “Mom, where are you?” I realized that… Well, that mom was gone.

Well, after that I came up to the room and said “Mom is gone”. I came to Yelena Anatolyevna’s room, she asked me where my mom was, – “Mom is gone”. She said “Well, we’ll take you in.”

After that my path lied with them. I’m very grateful to them.”

Doctor Yelena Matyushina was the one who got him out of Mariupol: she bonded with Sasha’s mom while they were in the theater. After the shelling of the theater Yelena consulted with her husband and then asked Sasha if he was willing to go with them. He didn’t have much choice: his mom was his only close relative, having no dad and no living grandparents. The boy agreed. Through a series of checkpoints they managed to reach Berdiansk, then Zaporizhzhia, and finally, Lviv.

“There were two more men the Matyushin family knew, who also came with us. They [Russian military] stripped these young guys, checking them for tattoos. Thankfully they let them through, and the guys then reached Dnipro on their own.

Amazing how much our wits and fast thinking did to save us. We had so much pharma from the theater, because all medicine was in Yelena Anatolyevna’s room, she was the chief medic. At one of the checkpoints they started searching us really thoroughly, and we said we were COVID patients who just recovered. They instantly backed off 16 feet, [one of them] said [to another] “Why the heck did you have to shake that dude’s hand?” We unpacked our stuff, and there were women’s clothes. Igor Valentinovich tells him [the soldier] “You wanna rifle through women’s stuff?” He says “Put’em back and move along.”

We stayed at a kindergarten in Tokmak because it was already past curfew. People there fed us really well. We received a hearty welcome – they were really kind to people at that kindergarten. People got fed, housed, they slept on normal clean bedsheets. So I would like to really thank that kindergarten. We reached Zaporizhzhia and registered as evacuees in case someone starts looking for us. We went shopping, because the shops were open which was unusual for us. We had a snack, then we reached Dnipro, and then Uman. There was a great volunteer named Evgeni in Uman, he’s a hotel co-founder. He lodged us in his hotel for free. We needed some things, some food. He paid for all of it. He helped us immensely at that stage. We headed to Ternopil from there, and then to Lviv.”

“I STEPPED OUTSIDE THE THEATER WITH MY KIDS – AND THERE LIES A DEAD WOMAN WITH A 4-YEAR-OLD KID. ANOTHER WOMAN TELLS ME, ‘TAKE THE KID!’ AND I’M JUST STANDING THERE – I HAVE TWO KIDS – AND MY HEAD IS SWIMMING.” YELENA MATYUSHINA, WHO GOT SASHA OUT OF MARIUPOL, HAD BEEN TREATING CHILDREN, WOMEN AND THE ELDERLY AT THE DRAMA THEATER

Yelena, along with her husband and her daughter, lived in the “Vostochny” microdistrict which borders the demarcation line. Yelena says that during the proverbial “8 years” they were repeatedly shelled by the so-called “DPR”.

On February 24th, it was the Vostochny microdistrict where the attack on the city began. According to Yelena, shelling of the residential houses began on the very first day. Her family managed to hang on in their house for three days, taking shelter either in the basement, or on the floor in a “blind” room. “On the fourth day conscripts from the Ukrainian side warned us to leave the district. We managed to cross the Post bridge [a bridge over Kalmius] past Azovstal [steel plant]. In literally a day or two, the left bank of Mariupol was gone. It was destroyed in two days,” the woman says.

Yelena and her family moved in with her mother at the Cheryomushki district. “It was a 9-story building with 5 entrances. Our apartment was in the 3rd section, right in the middle. We only managed to stay there for 2 days, then on the 3rd day a massive air raid began. We couldn’t make it out in time, but that’s probably for the better, or else we would’ve been killed by shrapnel. In the middle of our apartment there was a windowless corridor with rooms branching from it, so our family dropped to the floor in that corridor. But the explosion and the shockwave was immense, shattering every piece of glass: the balconies, every window, and the house was shaking violently. There were screams and total confusion. Once everything settled, we looked out of the window and saw that a missile hit the 2nd section. Three floors were gone and the rest were on fire. It took firefighters an entire day. Where were we supposed to stay?”

Then Yelena and her husband decided to move to the city center, namely the drama theater. She doesn’t remember the exact date because days and nights blended together for her.

“I remember the 24th of February, and after that there simply was no day or night. Then March 16th, when the theater was bombed.”

The woman says the theater resembled an anthill: each and every room, corridor and even staircase was packed full with people. Yelena is a rehabilitation physician. After seeing the immense number of people in need of medical attention, she set up an infirmary.

“It was late February or early March, meaning snow and temperatures below freezing. An insane number of small children and old people. The sheer number of the sick, or wounded, or injured… Shrapnel wounds, burns, bandages… I could go on and on.

Shock, stress, panic attacks, poisoning, severe fever – people are freezing, collapsing from hunger, dehydration – a really wide range.

I had been working as a doctor for 30 years, but now for the first time ever I had to become a field medic. I had a couple of pregnant girls, how do I put it, in such a state that I had to give them tranquilizers. They couldn’t stop shaking. I was afraid they would have a miscarriage. It would require surgery… I also feared acute abdomen with children. Back in the day I had plenty of those at my night shifts: they had to be moved to surgery, but how do you transport them if bombs are dropping all around us? A lot has happened. I’m grateful to everyone who supplied our pharmacy the best they could: at least I was able to use antibiotics in bulk, as well as anticeptics, bandages, syringes, spasmolytics, painkillers – because there was an insane number of people.

There wasn’t really any time to think, it all happens really fast, given that you’re working during an air raid – and they bring someone unconscious, someone bleeding, here’s an injury, there’s a burn, a child vomiting, someone with acute abdomen – I couldn’t keep up, I tried keeping patient charts but it was impossible because I had to attend to 2, 3 or 4 people at the same time. Every time I sat down to write, 3 or 4 people appeared [and loomed] over me. When could I write? And what could I write… The [size of the] crowd in the corridor was absolutely mind-boggling.”

Yelena saw as many patients as she could: “I delegated applying bandages and administering antibiotics to the nurses, my primary task was to examine [patients], and if they were in acute condition, I had to decide what shots to administer and what to do in general. Before they bombed our regional hospital, we could at least arrange some cars to send them people with injuries and severe bleeding. Then that hospital was destroyed. And that was it. So it goes.

We had a girl who was transporting a wounded [patient], and her car was immediately targeted by a sniper. A bullet entered her thigh and went through her stomach, gutting her. She was instantly brought to the 2nd [city hospital]. They extracted the fragments and the bullet and then returned her to me with no rehab, no ICU.”

Yelena recalls one time when they brought a wounded 75 to 77-year-old woman to the theater: “She had a broken arm, a burned face and a partially burned chest and hands. I’ve treated her burns; thankfully it was a closed fracture.

Her house was bombed, and she was living on the 8th floor. She fell down the gap from her 8th floor to the 6th, and then the fire started. Her husband on the 8th floor had burned alive. But she was recovered from there, with burns and fractures [and brought to the drama theater].

Another woman left the theater to secure some water or bread, next thing I know they bring her to me with an open wound: shrapnel, femoral artery, a fountain of blood. Unconscious. Those kinds of stories I recall.”

It was there in the theater that Yelena met Sasha’s mom. They happened to live across the hall: “We had a tiny room with a corridor in front of it, and there lived a single mother with a 12-year-old boy [Sasha]. During those 2 weeks we lived together, she worked at the kitchen. They’ve set up a field kitchen there: with more than a 1000 people, they had to feed people at least once a day. Sometimes people collapsed from hunger… The elderly would go for 5 or more days without food. And Sasha has ben chopping firewood for two weeks, on par with the men, because it was between February and March, we had snow lying around. Just so you know, we had nights as cold as -10 [14 degrees Fahrenheit]. He carried water, he helped his mother at the field kitchen outside. Everyone helped in some way: some repaired things, others cooked, I tended to people. There were bedridden people, there were little kids, there were pregnant women.

She [Sasha’s mom] worked at the kitchen. We lived across the hall: I helped them with first aid, they helped us with food. She had the same name as me, Yelena Anatolyevna, but she was 10 years younger. Kuznetsova Yelena Anatolyevna. She was killed. Almost in front of the kid’s eyes.”

March 16th. The air strike

“Although I kept watch at the infirmary for as long as I could physically bear… I still needed to eat at least once or twice a day, or just lie down for 15 or 20 minutes once in a day. So at the time of the explosion I left to drink some tea and just to catch my breath. I came up to my room on the 2nd floor; both my daughter and Sasha were there.

[At the moment of the air strike] the second half of that room – the walls flew apart, and the doors deformed into corkscrews – I had never seen anything like it. One half of our room got blown away, and the other half remained. Just no more walls, nothing. We were on the second floor, and I didn’t even know if I’d be able to come back down. Then we faced danger of further shelling and structural collapse, and a fire broke out. The building was tall and giant, with columns inside. Whoever stayed alive started shouting that we should hurry out because the building could collapse. We made our way through the rubble and headed out.

I stepped outside the theater with my kids – and there lies a dead woman with a 4-year-old kid. Another woman tells me, ‘take [the kid]!’ and I’m just standing there – I have two kids – and my head is swimming. I say ‘Don’t get me wrong… I can’t [raise] a 4-year-old, I’m not that young anymore. I’m taking the 12-year-old kid, somehow I’ll manage to bring him through. But what am I supposed to do with a 4-year-old?

It’s hard to estimate how many people have died. The entire kitchen along with storage got blasted. A couple of days ago I saw them dig through the rubble… Those excavators with their buckets are scooping up construction materials mixed with bodies. It’s been so many days…”

After the air strike Yelena, along with her husband, her daughter and Sasha, returned to her mother’s house: “She said she would keep watch in the apartment. We stuffed the windows with blankets the best we could. After the theater was bombed, we came back to Cheryomushki, but next day our house and a few houses next to it came under heavy fire. Our car got hit twice, it no longer had windows, and its doors were so deformed they couldn’t close. We climbed out after another bombing, got in our car and left.”

When we asked whether there was military personnel in the Drama Theater, Yelena answered:

“There wasn’t a single military person in the theater. I’ve been working as a doctor there for two weeks, I can’t even estimate how many patients went through my hands. People waited in line for hours under my door, so I don’t even know how many people I treated in one way or another: lots of children and old people.”

After Yelena’s family reached Lviv, colleages of her husband – Igor Matyushin, member of the theater staff – found them a place to stay in France. They had to move there as soon as possible, so that it wouldn’t get offered to someone else. Customs officers didn’t let Sasha out because he had no documents.

For now Sasha is staying with a relative of Yelena’s, Galina Matyushina. “My husband and I contacted social services. We received a document confirming they don’t mind that Sasha is temporarily staying with our family. We’ve enrolled in a school, now we’re studying and waiting for the laws to be updated. So that we could go to the family that got Sasha out at least in the summer, to live for a while without raid alerts and constant trips to the bomb shelter or to our bathroom. Of course it’s not [as bad as] Mariupol, but yesterday the boy had to do his algebra homework in the bathroom. Right now they won’t let him through the border, and unfortunately we have no laws regulating kids like him”, Galina told us.

Yelena Matyushina is planning to legally adopt Sasha as soon as it becomes possible.

Part 2. “If they had told me, ‘Learn Chinese, tomorrow this will be China, and there will be peace,’ I would have probably started learning Chinese. I’ve been through so much…”—Margarita spent 10 days in the theater with her husband and sons. Her husband was at the field kitchen at the moment of the air strike. He was killed.

The Chistyakovs—Igor with Margarita and their sons, David and Timur—lived near the Azovstal steel plant on Karasivs’ka Street, “almost where hell broke loose.” On March the 5th, their neighborhood was heavily shelled.

“That night, on March the 5th, it was as if we knew. Our children were in the cellar, and we were lying on the floor in our room. Our ceilings were high—you know, they used to make this plaster molding. All of it collapsed to the floor. I got hit on the head, we went down to the basement and managed to hang on until morning. The next day we went outside, and we were utterly shocked. There are 6 houses in the neighborhood—they simply vanished.

And where the aerial bomb fell, there was a crater 6 meters deep and 20 meters in diameter [20 by 65 feet]. There were people’s torsos lying on the roofs of nearby houses, remains.“

For the safety of the children, Margarita decided to send them to her parents in Pokrovsk. The Chistyakovs heard that there was an evacuation pickup point at the Drama Theater, but when they arrived, they found out that there was no green corridor. They decided to grab their belongings from home and move to the theater to wait for evacuation. It was impossible to stay on Karasivs’ka: with each passing day the severity of the bombings increased.

Seeing a huge number of people in the theater, Margarita and Igor volunteered to help: “My husband was an activist. I don’t want to say ‘he was’, I hope that maybe he’ll still show up somewhere. His urge to volunteer immediately prompted him to join in: they were helping people there, bringing clothes and mattresses from the railway station, getting food from the destroyed stores. The police and the military allowed us to take it so that looters wouldn’t, because there were lots of people in the theater, lots of children. Food from every nearby store and café was brought to the theater. I used to work as a cook myself, so I volunteered to cook at the kitchen.“

Margarita says that at first there were about 1000 people in the drama theater, then 1500, and later she even recalls the number reaching 2000.

No one was allowed into the auditorium because it was very dangerous. People were mostly accommodated in the corridors, the foyer, and smaller rooms. The Chistyakovs lived in a semi-basement room where props and theater scenery were stored.

“My husband and the boys were at our ‘storage’. They brought in supplies, sorted them out. They handed out clothes, baby food, and diapers. Everyone who worked at the ‘storage’ had tokens hanging around their necks—for access. They were made from coat check tags and given to the staff who had access to food, clothing, and medicine. We had our own doctor—another person who just came here. The kids were very sick because it was cold and damp. February was cold and rainy, and so was March and April. People who lived close to the theater ran home for jackets and blankets. Especially [those] in the basement—there was no light, no heating. We slept fully dressed.

We made stoves and grills out of stones, and we boiled water and cooked food on them. Then soldiers brought us a field kitchen. We even pickled herring there and baked our own bread. People were saying, ‘We deserve to get into the Guinness Book of Records because we baked bread on the street.’ Then we distributed all of that at the kitchen. In general, you could live there quite decently. Our ration was pretty diverse: we even gave candy, cookies, juices, and fruits to the children. People from nearby houses came to us asking to boil some water, and we gave them something to eat. We didn’t starve. We provided clothes and diapers—everything was very well organized,” Margarita says.

“At first, we kept count, made lists. But whenever there was an opportunity, people took the chance to get into cars and leave, and they weren’t crossed off the lists. When we were only starting, we cooked for 1500 people. At 8 a.m., we would gather at the field kitchen to have a briefing: they read us the news, kept us informed. We had a receiver, it crackled and hissed on some wavelength. Plus, there [usually] was a printed telephone message—maybe the military brought it, I don’t know. So during the briefing we decided how much to cook.“

“We noticed that the foyer was starting to empty out, but then more people would walk in from other neighborhoods.

We cooked for one and a half to two thousand people in two big cauldrons.

Then we considered cutting it back because there were fewer people. But locals would come, and we shared with them too. So we decided to cook the same amount anyway, to feed those who come.“

When asked if there were military personnel in the theater, Margarita answers with a resounding “no.” “Sometimes the police would come to us, our guys would go to the stores and warehouses with them. And sometimes soldiers tagged along. They kept watch to prevent looting. My son told me that those who tried to steal were knocked down to the floor with the butt of a rifle: ‘Shell out everything you took.’ Everything was meant for us, for refugees, for children.

Except one time, about three days before March 16th, a missile came in, which hit the building and broke a pine tree. These guys from the field kitchen were already used to explosions—they would just crouch against the wall, and that’s it. Well, you get used to everything—even the worst. By then they had learned to distinguish sounds: if it whistled, it meant it would pass by. It turned out that the spruce tree there by the right side was instantly cut down [by the shell]. And literally 15-20 minutes later, soldiers arrived, apologizing, asking, ‘Did anyone get hurt? Is everything okay?’ Well, only one woman was injured, the pine tree fell on her, so they took her to the hospital. And they really apologized because the missile flew slightly askew and grazed us. 

Aside from that, we didn’t even see any soldiers. Emergency responders would come because they pumped water near the theater, there were fire hydrants there. So the responders kept us updated on what was happening in the city. Where there was fighting, where there was communication, where it was calm. But the notion that there was an HQ and they were holding someone—that’s simply not true.“

March 16th. The airstrike

“On March 16th, my husband had breakfast and went to take over for his partner at the field kitchen. He barely stepped outside. The field kitchen was right by the walls of the theater. If you look at the main entrance, it was on the right side. And everything collapsed there. They were probably the noblest guys. And many of them fell there.

At that moment, my children and I were in the basement. There were some old props in the basement—wooden racks and façades for the New Year. Slabs fell on me, I was pinned down, and the children happened to be lying on mattresses, so when everything collapsed, they got covered by the racks—those held everything back a little. I ended up with a displaced fracture of my ribcage. The children somehow pulled me out from under the slabs. At the back of the theater, there was a wide, beautiful white staircase. The spot where we came out has been cleared by now. If you look from behind, we were on the right side, down in the basement. There was a switch room near us, and our room was downstairs to the right. And so we survived. The Lord must’ve somehow… There were about 14 or 15 of us there—we all got out. The youngest child among us was a year and 4 months old. I recently had a call with this family—they are all alive. So, my husband and her husband were at the kitchen. Her husband, Vitaliy, had just come back to eat, so I was feeding him. And my husband went to take over at the field kitchen.

After we got out, I started looking for my husband, but you couldn’t find anything there at all. The children came out, shouting, ‘Mom, dad is gone.’

There was Dima, about 35 years old. He lives on Torgova Street. I later saw an interview with him on the internet. I recognized him. It was my son who pulled him out. Right after the explosion Dima was absolutely spaced out, probably concussed or something. He came out of the theater all white, covered in whitewash or plaster, as if tinged with frost. He only came to his senses when they sent him to another basement. The next day, he went back there with my son—we thought maybe they’d start digging. Maybe he’ll see his dad. He came back, telling me, ‘Mom, nothing is being done there.’

I don’t understand! We wrote ‘Children’ in big letters with reflective paint. We covered the theater at night, we closed it off, we turned off our flashlights because of the curfew.

This word, ‘CHILDREN’… It was written in such huge letters, they were glowing. I think even the moon people on the moon could see this word, ‘children’! How could they? How? It’s beyond inhumanity!

There was no headquarters there! The only HQ was our guys, who cooked food and fed the children, who tried to warm everyone, wrapping them up in jackets, sweaters, socks, hats and gloves.“

After the airstrike, Margarita and her sons returned home to Karasivs’ka Street. The woman was severely injured—she could barely breathe because of her fractured rib cage. Their neighbor, who lived even closer to Azovstal, took them in. But they could only manage to live there for 3 days: “Thirty times a night her windows would get blown out, and they would plug them again. When we realized her house was done for, I told her we couldn’t stay anymore. I was begging her: ‘Come on, Lyuda, let’s go with us, anywhere at all—I don’t know where to go, but let’s just get out of the city.’ Well, she’s an old woman, she said, ‘I won’t leave my house. Save the children, you’ve already lost enough.’“

Margarita and her children returned to the city center and found a bomb shelter near the Drama Theater, in the building where the central dentistry was located [Another witness, Sergey Zabogonsky, said that some survivors went to this bomb shelter during the airstrike]. There, Margarita recalls, they had to go through an even more terrifying experience than in the Drama Theater.

“Since we had nowhere to go, we just wandered into this dentistry. They, of course, took us in. We arrived there on March 19th. And on March 24th, someone threw some kind of incendiary mixture or a gas bomb into the basement, I don’t know what. It was 9 or 10 pm. Smoke started, horror ensued.

People started screaming, choking from the fumes and smoke. The entrance collapsed, and we had to get out through another. Stepping on bones… Screaming, shouting, trampling over each other. I could feel it myself—on my back, on my arms. There was panic, you couldn’t see a thing, smoke [was everywhere]. And my trouble with my rib cage on top of that. Again, the children pulled me out—I don’t know how—by my arms, by my legs from that basement.

We got out and lay under the open sky—it was dark, everything was burning, blazing. We weren’t going to wait, we started walking again. ‘Frogs’ [landmines] were jumping out from the sides: tripwires or whatever else. There were about 12 of us, we got out of the dentistry together. Walking through the city at night was very scary. Then we were stopped by the military. They said, ‘Stop, who’s there?’ We said, ‘We’re civilians.’ Turned out they were soldiers of the ‘DPR.’ We told them we got gassed in the basement, we don’t know by whom. They took us to a basement of a residential building, called up the resident in charge, and he gave us shelter in that basement. The soldiers gave us each about 50 grams [~2 oz] of milk because we were vomiting, we were all coughing from the fumes. Our mouths were burning terribly.“

In the residential building where Margarita and the other survivors were taken by the military, a closed group had already formed: “Local residents in that basement — they had their own clique, so to speak, and we were strangers there.

So squabbles began: ‘Don’t touch the water,’ ‘get your own water.’ So we realized we weren’t welcome there. We left, leaving only two elderly people behind; there were 8 of us.“

In the end, Margarita and her children stumbled upon a church, where they took shelter until March 26th—until they chanced upon a minibus with the Red Cross insignia on the street: “The car was all battered, no windows, no doors. The driver asked us where a certain street was. We asked him, ‘What do you want?’ He said he was going for people, that he was a volunteer. We practically begged him to take us out of there. And he managed to put 18 of us in this van—we don’t know how we all fit in there. He took us out to Manhush. And the morning after that—on March 27th—he came for us, and for no fee, no nothing, he took all of us to Zaporizhia. The volunteer named Volodya—we were so grateful to him.“

Later Margarita has found out that this volunteer was captured by the ‘DPR’ soldiers and is now in detention in the occupied territories. His charges are unknown.

Vladimir is in a prison in Olenivka (DPR). Along with him, 29 other volunteers disappeared in the vicinity of Mariupol — detailed reports were provided by Mediazona Belarus.

The woman desperately wants to return to her hometown, even while it’s under Russian control: her daughter, her son-and-law and her granddaughter are still there. Margarita also hopes to learn any news about her husband who got buried under the rubble of the drama theater.

“Still, as soon as I get my passport, I will start knocking on doors, I want to go back. Because my husband is still there. I don’t even know whom to ask, where to refer to about my husband. How can I find out anything about him? I’ve reached the point where I wrote down what he was wearing, what shoes he had on. I want to know where he is, where he’s buried, God forbid… Overall, it’s very scary, it’s horrifying.

We’ve lost everything, everything. I’m left with two children. And a cat—I managed to rescue the cat, too. He’s a Scottish Fold. He went through everything with us, he was in the drama theater, we pulled him out of that gas smoke. And now he’s lying on my bed here. I’m keeping him in memory of my daughter, it was her gift, it’s my last connection to my daughter. I had a stable job, my children were studying, the boys were learning their profession. Everything has come crashing down, the house, the documents. I have two boys, how can I manage without a man, without a provider and support? I’m left half a cripple. Why, why, why couldn’t all this be peacefully resolved? Honestly, as long as there’s no war, that’s all that matters to me.

Maybe it’s a sin to say so. But if they had told me, ‘Learn Chinese, tomorrow this will be China, and there will be peace,’ I would have probably started learning Chinese. I’ve been through so much… I don’t care who it is anymore. Just let my children, my family, be alive. I’ll be fine with anything…

As long as I can see my children, my husband… Maybe it’s wrong, maybe I’m a bad patriot, but I just want to keep my family, my children, I want peace! I want them to live and not be afraid when some plane flies by. I don’t know… Maybe it’s even stupid, but when you’ve been through this and you’ve seen all this…

When a 9-year-old girl walks along the path and accidentally steps on this ‘frog’ [landmine], and they’re shouting at her, ‘FREEZE!’. But she doesn’t understand, she lifts her leg in fright, and it blows off everything up to her pelvis, and that’s it… It’s terrifying, don’t you see?!“

Part 3. EVGENIA ZABOGONSKAYA WORKED AT THE MARIUPOL DRAMA THEATER FOR 20 YEARS. IT WAS SHE WHO BECAME  THE THEATER’S “COMMANDANT” DURING THE WAR

Evgenia came to the theater with her family on the first day of the Russian invasion, February 24th. During the first few days only the actor Damir Sukhov, the fire safety brigade and security guards were there. As the shelling of the city intensified, more people started to flock to the theater – at first for short periods, to wait out the bombings, but then they began staying overnight. “Some of our colleagues came to the theater, saw all the elderly, women and children – there were about 60 of us then – and brought hot soup for the children; I would go home to get some boiling water. Right in the tea kettle. Then in a large thermos, when someone brought it in. When the water was shut off, we collected rainwater in the street. It was snowing, we were melting the snow – to flush the toilets, to keep the space clean.”

Evgenia became the “senior” person at the theater almost by accident: “Once I went to boil some water, and when I came back, people told me: “You are our commandant”. I said: “What do you mean? Who told you?” – “The police came and signed you up as a commandant. Well, they asked us who was in charge here, we said that you were.” Evgenia knew the building of the drama theater well – she worked there for 15 years as a lighting engineer, and for the last 5 years she was a lighting designer.

When the news began spreading around the city that people were going to be gathered at the drama theater for evacuation, hundreds of people began to flock to the building. “People came to the theater from all over the city, from different parts, there was a huge number of cars. A huge number of people, who simply came on foot. And so people wait and wait, and then they announce: “There will be no evacuation.” The people who were in the cars left. And those who came on foot, where would they go? They stayed in the theater.”

[Image of the message in a local social network and the evacuation line near the theater at the beginning of March. The social media message reads: “someone just told me:”An acquaintance had spent an hour (at 11 am Ukraine time) in line by the Drama theater for evacuation, the buses didn’t come, someone came out and said that they couldn’t arrange for security with the russian side and asked us to return to our homes. The firing is still heard in the city. 11:20”]

“People began to settle in places, here and there. They began to break down chairs in the auditorium in order to make room where they could spread something and sit. We began to ask: “Don’t do this, don’t break the auditorium, we’ll take everything out now, we’ll give everything to everyone, we’ll arrange everything, just give it time.” We pulled out all the chairs, all the sofas, chairs, everything possible that was used as stage props in plays. We started taking down backstage curtains to spread something. Pulled out all the mattresses, mats. We gave people the tools so they could dismantle the auditorium chairs carefully without breaking them. But few people were careful … Basically, they just started breaking them. Oak armchairs… Almost 700 chairs in the auditorium – almost everything was smashed to smithereens. This is how the first 500 people settled here.”

Evgenia has been warning people where they absolutely must not settle – that was the stage, the auditorium and the parquet hall on the second floor. There, there were giant wooden stained-glass windows, spanning the height of the entire second and third floor. But not everyone listened to the advice of the “commandant”.

The more people came to the theater, the more problems arose with water and food. There were 2 fire reservoirs near the theater. Yevgenia says that after the city lost its water supply, firefighters took water from the reservoir hatches to extinguish burning buildings. “Here is how we divided it: one reservoir for us, the other – for the firefighters. All in all, there were two hundred tons of water in these reservoirs.”

The men found plastic tanks which they filled with water daily so that people could at least minimally wash themselves and wash the dishes.

“People were arriving every day, because evacuations were announced daily. According to our calculations, the maximum number of people there was 1200. We counted by the number of servings of food,” says Evgenia.

“Gradually, we organized a whole commune in the theater. When people realized that there were no volunteers here, that all the people here were just like them, who had come to save themselves and wait out the explosions, people began to offer their help. So we got “guards”, people who took care of firewood, watched the campfires, carried water, cooked – we had real chefs. There were girls who helped prepare the food – cleaning, slicing, so that the chefs would only take and cook. There were women who helped me clean the bathrooms. The police helped us a lot: when they saw how many people we had in the theater, they gave us a field kitchen within just a few hours. This helped us a lot. Then the police brought us wooden pallets, we used them to also make a fence around the field kitchen, so that no one would get burned or hurt.

We helped each other as best we could. The police and volunteers brought us food, toothbrushes, toothpaste, and other things. During the last days, they even brought us pillows and mattresses. After the railway station was bombed out, the police took out all the blankets, pillows and mattresses from the intact cars, and delivered them to the bomb shelters around the city – they were in cinemas, in the recreation center. When they came to us, we told them about the problems we had. If they could help, they would bring us what we needed. They helped us organize a first-aid station, brought us medicines. Helped a lot with insulin for diabetics. There was a big problem with medicines for children – to treat fever and stomach infections. The children had upset stomachs because there was a problem with water, with handwashing.”

Evgenia distributed infant formula to mothers with small children – this was also in short supply: “There were very few cereals, formula, I poured them into clean disposable cups and distributed them to mothers. I couldn’t hand out whole packs. I also handed out wet wipes little by little, and when we got a whole box, each mother received her own pack.”

Zabogonskaya also talks about the frightening moments that the drama theater experienced. For example, about mortar shelling, when people were saved only by a fir tree growing next to the building. “Our boys who worked in the field kitchen got a little injured. Their wounds were not serious, the doctors treated them, and 15 minutes later they were already cooking dinner for us. Also, two women who cooked their own food on small campfires, were also injured, by flying glass. One woman had a leg wound, she was bleeding heavily, but our “guards” quickly found a man who agreed to take her to the hospital in the 17th microdistrict. And another woman with cut buttocks was taken to the hospital twice: the first time she was not given proper care, they simply treated and dressed her wounds, and put a diaper on her.

That woman was brought back to us and in an hour the diaper was full of blood”.

And then another “unpleasant” moment happened.

“When it was decided to take that woman back to the hospital, the girl named Nastya volunteered to accompany her. She is 15 years old, she came to the theater with her brother and friends. And she is such a lively girl, she helped everyone, talked with everyone, played with the kids. Very good, bright person. As eyewitnesses told me, she said: “I will go with her to make sure she gets proper care.” They got caught in the line of automatic fire. Nastya was badly hurt. The bullet entered the thigh and exited through the stomach. Nastya was kept there in the hospital, they operated on her, but said that she would be sent back to us. We were shocked: how, with such a wound, a person can return to a cold place with no glass in the windows? It was minus 10 outside, it was +10 in the building with boarded up windows, it was very cold. After a few days, Nastya was brought to our theater with drains protruding from her stomach. Our doctors did not receive any accompanying instructions – how to treat her, what she needs – did not get anything. Our doctors examined her, consulted with each other, decided which medicines were needed. They gave me this list. When I saw it, I was shocked, a huge list. The doctor said to me: “Zhenya, we need this very much.”

Evgenia’s husband communicated with volunteer organizations – he eventually got the necessary medicines for Nastya.

“We also organized a “population census” in the theater. We had our own journals for each district of the city, in which people who came to us were recorded in alphabetical order. These journals are likely to have remained intact, because all the videos that I saw, on the Internet, in that part of the theater – in the wardrobe – there was no fire there. Perhaps these journals are still there, ” says the woman. However, according to her, the task was not to count the people. The lists were kept because “the police said so.”

One day at an impromptu planning meeting, where representatives from the “security”, the kitchen and other “theatrical services”, as Yevgenia herself calls them, gathered, one of her assistants suggested writing the word “CHILDREN” in front and behind the building. On the 4th floor, where there was an art workshop, there was found a bucket of white paint and a roller: “And the guys who were free did it. Literally a few hours later these words appeared. They were very large – imagine if everything is visible from the satellite.”

On the night of March 15 to 16, when the city center was heavily shelled, in the theater, according to Evgenia, almost no one slept: “I did not sleep all night. I can’t imagine how our children slept. It was something terrible, the ground was shaking non-stop. I walked around the theater at night, none of the people slept, everyone was very afraid. In the morning the shelling stopped.  When we went out and started lighting campfires, the central market was burning. Such black smoke was coming… And we saw that the department store was destroyed… We looked at what had been bombed around us. People were very frightened, and many decided that it was today that they had to leave.

I also began being deathly afraid exactly after that night. For the first time in 3 weeks I felt scared.

Before then, I wasn’t afraid, I was sure that everything would be fine, that the theater would not be touched. That our words CHILDREN will protect us. That it will be like our flag. Well, everyone knew how many people we had there, children, women.

We did not hide from anyone, everyone saw what we were preparing. Drones were constantly flying over us… Everything was in plain sight. Often people came to us to get news, because the police handed out leaflets about what was happening, which positions had been taken, how many were wounded, what was happening in other areas. We listened to the radio at the checkpoint. Well, so it was. And hoped. Our boys joked: “The war will end, we will be rebuilding the city, and the drama theater’s hostel will continue on until the city is restored.”

March 16

At the time of the airstrike, Evgenia and her husband were in the electrical shop on the stage – there she kept the most scarce goods – bottled water for small children, napkins and diapers. “We went there to talk without interruptions. Because in the theater everyone constantly asked us something, we constantly helped someone, brought something. Literally 1-2 minutes – and this happened.

I even … I was immediately shell-shocked: ringing in my ears, darkness, sparks. And my husband and I are getting buried under falling rubble. While this was happening, I did not even move. When I felt that it had stopped falling on me, my husband and I began to shout for each other. Found out that we are both alive. My husband dug himself out, dug me out. We opened our eyes – and were in shock from what was happening around, and how everything changed in one second. We dug ourselves out and realized that we had to run to our child and check what happened with the bomb shelter.

The bomb shelter was absolutely intact, there was no dust, nothing. Everyone there was alive, but they were very scared. In the foyer, people panicked, looking for each other, children – for parents, men – for women, women – for men. And they also didn’t know what to do, run to the basement or run away from the theater. Our daughter was very scared. My husband said: “Take  her away.” And then said: “I will stay, I will help the people as much as I can.” We learned that the field kitchen was under the rubble. And just then, the guys were working there, starting to bake bread. Making soups there. I ran to take our child away, my father lived nearby, we went to him. And my husband stayed to help until a big fire started. When the big fire had already begun, my husband said that he could no longer get anywhere, take a big risk … ”.

Evgenia says that when she went out to the foyer of the first floor and peeked into the auditorium, the roof was still there. Most likely, it caved in later, when the fire destroyed overlapping.

“I know that many eyewitnesses, my friends, who live opposite the drama theater, said that it was definitely an airstrike.”

Evgenia claims that not a single military man has ever been in the theater. “There are a lot of rumors that the military allegedly settled in the theater with us. We have never had anyone from the military in the theater, no one. There were only families of police officers who helped us. But there were no soldiers. No one spent the night here and we had no headquarters. A lot of distorted information is circulating, they made up something that was not there. ”

The lists of people from the drama theater are likely gone forever. “I think no one will pay attention to these journals. They will be thrown out, exactly as they tried to throw away all the documentation of the drama theater, when they opened the room, where the entire personnel department was relocated. They just threw our work books out into the street like garbage when they started dismantling the drama theater. Nobody was interested in this documentation. Our employees – those who could not leave Mariupol – when they came, they saw how our personnel department was taken out and thrown out like garbage. They wrote to me that my work book was taken away.”

Evgenia says that she treats the official position of the Russian Federation about what happened in the drama theater in the same way as she treats “any lie”: “I am disgusted by any lie, how else can I treat this? I agree to give an interview only because I want to tell how it really was. What I know myself. War is always terrible, ordinary people suffer. No one can think well of this. Except for those people who are involved in all this.”

Sergei Zabogonskiy, an actor of the Mariupol Drama Theater, showed what was happening in the building a few days before the bombing

Evgenia’s husband, Sergei, who worked in the Mariupol Drama Theater for 19 years as an actor, joined the “Halabuda” volunteer service during the war, he searched for food and medicine – “walked around the city during the bombing.” When, a few days before the air strike, he returned from another such trip to the theater, people approached him and said that the military had come. Sergei, together with another theater actor, Damir Sukhov, gave them a tour, showing that hundreds of women and children were hiding in the building: “I ran there, there were “Azov” people there, we filmed a video for half an hour. I took them to all three floors of the theater, took them to the Van Goghs – this is a restaurant near the drama theater, there were also 80 people there. Damir Sukhov – he had a nervous breakdown then, you see.”

Damir Sukhov says at the end of the video:

 “People, hear us! There are more than a thousand people here: small children, each with a fever, there are women in labor. Here are the wounded, the pain, here it is difficult. Help us! Please stop this whole story! Give us the corridor to move out all the women, children and the wounded! Please! I don’t know who, I don’t know how – stop the f***ing thing!”

Sergei says that the military and police periodically came to them, brought food, pillows and blankets: “They came every two or three days, the police came more often. An employee of our theater, Igor Matyushin (his wife was a doctor in the theater) worked as an administrator for us. And when the war started, he joined the police. He took over the patronage over the drama theater, because we have neither the director, nor his deputy, nor the chief accountant, no one. Therefore, we have created such a commune. My wife took it on, I supported her. I walked around the city during the bombing, looking for food, and at that time my wife resettled people who arrived … “

On March 16, Sergey made rounds of the drama theater in the morning, checking all three floors – he performed this ritual every day, asking whether everyone was feeling well. Then he went to the Van Goghs, checked if everything was in order there. After that, Sergei stopped by the field kitchen: “It was around 8 am, the guys told me: “In the building opposite us, 100-150 meters away, the military and equipment moved in.” And on that day we decided to barricade all the doors, so that if they started to knock them out, they would not get into the drama theater. We barricaded the doors, and placed a “guard” at each door. They left only one door open – where the field kitchen was.”

A few minutes before the airstrike, Sergei was going to go to room 19, which was located behind the Small Stage on the 3rd floor. But his wife stopped him and asked him to go to the shop. “If I hadn’t run into my wife, then I probably wouldn’t be alive now.” Sergei still keeps the key to room 19.

During the airstrike, Sergei and Evgenia were in her shop near the stage: “Both doors were closed – they were opposite each other. One door is from the stage, and the other is from the service area. And at the moment of the explosion, I just heard a pop, then I see: this metal door is flying at my wife, I manage to look at the opposite side – the door is flying at me.

I see black billows there, and then darkness, and then in about three seconds I asked: “Zhenya, are you alive?”. She said, “Yes, alive.” And we started to dig. A fraction of a second – and the doors were knocked out from both sides.”

The roof, according to him, was destroyed immediately after the airstrike: “The bomb, it turns out, dropped onto the scene. When we got out from under the rubble with my wife, we were going to leave through the stage, but it didn’t work out, because there was just a hole, everything was twisted, metal, concrete – everything was mixed there. So we went out through the street. Basically, those who were on the stage, under the stage, in the field kitchen were affected. Under the stage there is also a hold where we kept stage props, where you could see the stage turntable rotating. Well, those who were sitting there – they, mostly, could be affected. And those who were incidentally on stage and in the auditorium. Those who were in the foyer, they almost weren’t affected.”

After Sergei got out of the building, he walked around the theater: “After the explosion, I helped to pull people out near the field kitchen – we only pulled out three of them. The rest are most likely, naturally, dead.” Then he went to his father-in-law, who lived nearby – on the Pushkin street – where Evgenia took their daughter. “Then my son came, he said: “It’s starting to smoke there.” We came back, there were already policemen, helping people, bandaging the wounded. When I arrived, there was already a flame – in the office, in the dressing rooms. I wanted to go in and find my glasses, but my son said: “Where are you going? Stop already.”

There was no one to save people – the fire station in the city had already been bombed out by that time: “One could only count on the military and police, but there were few of them.”

Sergei claims that 600-700 people remained in the drama theater that day, since many have left the day before. “I can’t judge, but in my opinion, of those whom I saw, somewhere between 60-100 were killed.”

“The fact that there were no military there is unequivocal. Nobody held us hostage. As they say, I give a tooth,” says Zabogonsky.

Now, in the drama theater of Mariupol, propagandists of the “DNR” conduct tours for the “distinguished guests” and journalists from Russia, saying that on February 22, “Azov” allegedly set up its headquarters there and held people hostage, eventually blowing up the theater along with people. According to the adviser of Mariupol’s mayor Petr Andryushchenko, the woman in the video below is a certain journalist Alena Morozova.

“I saw this video. I don’t know who this young lady is, what she has to do with the theater. I don’t know, and what the fuck kind of tours – is she doing tours on top of people’s bones? It turns out so? I just don’t know who this woman is. She has nothing to do with the bomb shelter, she did not live there. She can’t say anything. She can either only say what they tell her, or what she came up with, what was conceived in her sick head, ” says Sergei.

The current Acting General Director of the theater Ilya Solonin, who announced that the theater season in Mariupol will open on September 10, is also unknown to any of the employees of the Drama Theater – he was appointed by the authorities of the “DNR”. “Our actors, those who have nowhere to go, called us, said: “Come on, come back here.” I said that I really want to return to Mariupol, but when it will be Ukrainian. And when  will that be – nobody knows. I don’t know Solonin. I saw the video of the first rehearsal. By September 10, they want to open the theater season. The way I feel, rehearsals are such a savage, terrible show-off, like, “everything is fine with us.” And I ask the guys: is there power, is there water? Is it really possible to live there? They say: yes, somewhere there is. Power and water were back on in some small districts, but  nowhere else in the city. People are living there now the same as they lived during the shelling.”

Sergei believes that the theater must be restored, and a memorial should be built there: “Restore and be sure to indicate that people died at this place on March 16. The memorial is a must. Because the explosion in the Mariupol Drama Theater is indicative and iconic. The word “CHILDREN” – it was visible from above. Therefore, any pilot could see it all. We hoped that the word would save the drama theater. They also told me: “Is it possible we will be bombed?” “Who would bomb us?” The word “CHILDREN” was on both sides, you can see everything – that people are in the field kitchen, that people are burning garbage.”

Part 4. “You could see the damn inscription! It was visible even from the planes. They have drones after all, they didn’t just randomly drop that bomb. You could see it all! It said ‘CHILDREN’!” — Daria Eskina spent about two weeks in the Drama Theater. She also volunteered, helping arrange their daily life. She managed to leave just a few hours before the bombing.

On February 23rd, Daria was discharged from the hospital after being treated for pneumonia. Together with a friend they bought a can of beer, and they were just walking around the city. “There had been posts in news groups that the war would start on February 16th. Nothing happened, so we met on the 23rd and we felt great—damn it, that was the last time I saw my close friends. And on February 24th at 5:24 am there was a tremendous explosion. I check Telegram, I ask the guys on Instagram what’s going on, I open the ‘Ukraine’ news channel, and there’s a post: ‘War has started.’ It was the scariest moment of my life, I’ll never forget the panic I experienced at that moment.“

Daria lived in the Kamensk neighborhood in Kalmiuskyi District, which began to be actively shelled from the first days of the war. “I just got fed up with everything that was going on. Because in Kamensk, shells were constantly exploding, people were dying from shrapnel. We dragged those bodies, tried to bury them, but by the time you bury them… There was very little time. Because shells were flying constantly. And they just lay in piles.

So when I saw all this, I felt so much hate that I decided to go to the military enlistment office. I had an acquaintance in the military, he said they were taking volunteers—girls, guys, it didn’t matter.“

On the way to the enlistment office, Dasha saw a mark on a tree—a blue cross. She started smearing it with wet soil, and at that moment a police car drove by: “The policeman called out to me and said, ‘What are you doing?’ He thought I was a saboteur. I noticed he was about to pick up his weapon, and I said, ‘Wait, wait, I’m trying to paint it over, I’m from Mariupol.’”

At the enlistment office, Dasha wasn’t outright rejected, but they asked her to come back the next day, saying ‘everyone in charge is out there, fighting, but you can come tomorrow morning, and they will enlist you.‘

“When I was returning, I came under helicopter fire. It was very scary. I heard the sound of a helicopter, and it deafened me. I looked up and realized the helicopter was right above me. At first, I thought it was ours, because at that time I hadn’t yet learned to tell equipment apart, which was ours and which wasn’t. And they don’t paint the letter ‘Z’ on helicopters. I only realized whose it was when our soldiers ran out and started aiming at it. At that moment, I fell on the ground behind Azovmash [manufacturing complex]—there’s this abandoned glass-fronted building there. The helicopter started dropping something, I couldn’t really tell what. I got buried in a heap of soil. I realized I was starting to suffocate from this soil, drifting away, so with my last bit of strength I managed to get up and started running. I turn around—and something falls right where I’ve been lying, it explodes, and I just fly aside. And that’s it. I don’t remember anything after that. I suspect I was unconscious for about 10 minutes.“

After that, Dasha realized that she wouldn’t return to a military enlistment office. It was after that day that “the real horror began” in Kamensk. “When I ran home, hysterical, I heard violent explosions every 5 minutes. It was awful. And according to the latest news—there was a girl I knew, a neighbor; we went down to the basement together, and there were a lot of children in the basement. She said that when the shell hit, the basement just collapsed.“

Dasha realized that she urgently needed to evacuate from Kamensk after a shell directly hit her apartment. Fortunately, it didn’t explode. She was very worried about her grandmother and asked a neighbor, who was about to leave with his family, to give them a lift at least to her friend’s house. The man agreed and gave them 5 minutes to gather their things. “As soon as we took literally two steps, a shell hit the entrance opposite the car, and it just collapsed, [splitting] into two parts. I lost my hearing for a while, then I snapped out of it hearing the man shout, ‘Get in the car!’ We got into the car and drove at 120 km/h. There was another car parked next to us, and a shell hit it—it exploded right before our eyes.“

Dasha settled her grandmother in Sadky in the Kalmiuskyi district, where there were small summer cottages with basements and gardens. Leaving 1000 hryvnias [~$33] to her grandmother, the girl hitchhiked to the Drama Theater.

At the entrance to the theater, Dasha saw a long convoy of cars labeled “CHILDREN.” “The thought of getting into one of those cars crossed my mind, but some instinct told me not to do that. I saw that a huge line had formed at the theater. And I decided that I could spend the night there. I spent that one night sitting by the toilet [door], because there was no more room. The next day, a military man came, who would later sometimes come to us bringing news from the city, because all communications were out. He said that the entire convoy that was trying to leave—they were all gunned down. Most of them were children with their parents.“

After spending 2 days in the Drama Theater, Dasha noticed people tagged with tape on their shoulders. Those were volunteers. “I already knew a couple of people, at least I saw them in Mariupol. I asked what they were doing, and they invited me to become a volunteer. There was this volunteer named Zhenya, a girl with glasses who would always go around helping, looking for flashlights and so on. She was the one who gathered people willing to help. She found an infirmary, found keys to all the doors, opened offices so that people could sleep there. [Dasha refers to the “commandant” of the drama theater, Yevgenia Zabogonskaya, her story is told here].

“The situation was horrifying, because there were a lot of mothers with children and elderly people in the basement. There were no men there. Children were constantly sick. I would come down to the basement, asking who needed help, how everyone was feeling. It was cold in the theater, but whenever I went down to the basement, it felt like 35 C [95 F]—that’s how much of a fever the people there had. Our volunteer guys would explore warehouses, finding leftover food, they cooked soups and light porridges on campfires, they would find service water and boil it. Me and the other girls attended the food counter, pouring soups, boiled water, and porridge into cups. We handed it all out on schedule. There wasn’t so much food as to really fill up, but we also found cookies, so we fed people as best we could. At least no one complained.“

“Injured children were brought to us. Almost every day we received information that a bus would bring 20 children plus a few mothers. The next day it would be 30, then another 50, and so on. So for the most part they only brought children,” Dasha recounts.

There were so-called “security guards” in the theater: volunteers who maintained order and wouldn’t let people out of the building after curfew. Dasha was one of these “guards”: “Basically, I didn’t sleep during those three weeks because everything that’s happening weighs on you, and because of this I also worked ‘guard’ shifts at the theater from 3 a.m. to 8 a.m. The theater ‘guards’ were the ones who made sure people smoked only on the 3rd floor, or that nobody used flashlights at night because it was dangerous, and sometimes they kicked out people who were too noisy.

We, the volunteers, had flashlights. We found a generator and used it to charge people’s phones so they could occasionally turn on flashlights before curfew. And at least entertain their children in some way. Some managed to bring mattresses and blankets to sleep with relative comfort. And people like me just slept standing. I had nothing with me. I was in an orange suit soaked in blood. And that’s it.“

Dasha also confirms that lists of inhabitants were kept at the theater: “I personally kept lists of people, along with the other volunteer girls. We wrote down their full names, former addresses, and phone numbers. We managed to cover the basement, the first floor, and half of the second floor — and that was already 2000 people. This means we still had a floor and a half to go, so there were many more than 2000. And people settled however they could—some grannies just slept on the stairs. Our boys tore out the seats from the auditorium and made mattresses out of them. They put them on the floor, and people slept on top of them. Navigating there at night was impossible, because there were at least 100 people in each corridor. You walk there and you stumble over legs, arms, or heads. Some people slept next to the toilet. Everything was very strange, scary, and unusual compared to normal life. Conditions were totally unsanitary, but there simply was no other option.“

Whether the lists survived is unknown, but according to Daria and those we managed to talk to, they were left in the foyer—the room that took little damage. “The lists were kept on the 1st floor, to the left side past the entrance, where the cloakroom used to be. That’s where we compiled those lists: food distribution was there, and we collected signatures. There was Kalmiuskyi District, Livoberezhnyi District, right bank, city center—basically all districts, and people were listed alphabetically. I don’t know if these lists still exist, because I’ve heard they were taken, but it’s unclear by whom. Well, in theory they should still be there, because I’ve watched videos with the aftermath of the bombing, and the room where the lists used to be is intact. At most, its windows got blown out.“

According to Dasha, during the first days the city center remained relatively safe. She and the others even managed to go out for cigarettes. Mariupol saw the start of occasional bartering—people exchanged products, goods, and tobacco. “There was no bread or clean water at all. When our soldiers found out that there were so many people at the theater, they brought us a field kitchen, and sometimes they provided food. They would bring us A4 leaflets informing us what was happening in the city. They explained which districts were shelled. And this piece of paper circulated around the theater, people passed it to each other.“

Dasha recalls that during the first days they saw incoming strikes on the shopping center opposite the theater, and a café on Budivel’nykiv Avenue. She remembers the time when she last went to the Zerkalny store for groceries. That day there was a line at the supermarket, consisting of 300 people by her estimate. Only two at a time were let in. Dasha had to wait from 7 a.m. until 2 p.m. before they finally let her in: “There was a very limited supply of groceries, but it was better than nothing. We would pay there with money and come back to the theater. That was the last time we went there because after that, everyone there just got shot. Or blown up. The specifics are unclear.“

Dasha also remembers the hit at the field kitchen: “I was working at the food counter, when suddenly I heard a loud explosion. Then a boy comes to us, limping. At first, I made a joke about him because it looked quite funny. He said, ‘Don’t laugh, a mine just landed off course. The field kitchen got hit, several people were injured.’“

“At the drama theater, we could see all those Russian planes. They would often just fly over the theater, dropping their bombs elsewhere. Once I was standing with a volunteer, Zheka, I don’t know if he’s alive or not. The military had brought us a carton of cigarettes: they found them in some warehouse, brought them and said, ‘Here, take this for your help.’ We took 2 cigarettes, and we were standing there smoking, when a plane started flying by. I’m shouting at everyone to go inside. And suddenly Zheka says to me, ‘Dasha, be quiet, look how beautifully it flies.’ Damn, it’s a shame we didn’t film it, the phone ran out of battery. There were so many moments like that, us joking around — we really just stood there watching that plane. But the sounds were scary, I still get startled by them,” the girl says.

Dasha also took care of a 15-year-old volunteer named Nastya, who was shot in the thigh while transporting a wounded person: “I looked after her as well, sat with her all night. But according to the latest information, she’s dead. Her parents are fighting—both her dad and her older brother. Her mom was on the Left Bank—it’s the hottest spot. She was at the theater with her other brother, and she also had other relatives there. When I was leaving the theater, I came by to say goodbye to them, and she was lying there in tears under a drip. I asked, ‘What happened?’ She said, ‘My relatives abandoned me, they left me alone with my brother.’ This girl helped everyone at the theater a lot, she was very active, she would constantly come up asking ‘How are you feeling?’“

Dasha recalls how she found out about her grandmother’s death, whom she left in Sadky: “One day I had a very bad feeling, I couldn’t sit still. I just felt terrible. And I walked from the drama theater to Ilyich [Avenue]—to the place where I left my grandmother. 

I’ve been walking for about three hours because there was constant shelling. You know, that sound when a plane flies by — it’s the scariest sound. 

And those were prevalent at that point—the sound of the plane and I don’t know what it is, but when the bomb comes, first there’s a squeak, then a loud explosion. And I kept hearing that when I was going to Ilyich. I tried to keep near the entrances so that if anything happened, I could drop under the stairs or dive into the basement, or just stand near the doors.

My grandmother was the closest person to me throughout my life, and… Well, Sadky was often hit. And the house where my grandmother was staying was simply crushed. 

I saw my grandmother’s charred body… I recognized her by her jacket.“

On March 15th, the day before the airstrike, the city center underwent intense shelling. “On the night of March 15th, they started firing really close, those were serious hits. I couldn’t sleep. It was very scary. I decided I had to leave by any means necessary. I was alone, I didn’t have a car, all I had was my ID and 2000 hryvnias [~$70]. By that time, they had already started firing at cars, at nearby buildings, windows were shattering. In the morning, one of the ‘guards’ I worked with put me in his car with his family and drove us towards Berdiansk. The convoy was driving under fire. There were mines, we drove around them, a couple of downed tanks, and that was it. That’s how it was back then, later even that route was cut off.“

Dasha left the Drama Theater on the morning of March 16th—just a couple of hours before the shelling.

Dasha only learned about the airstrike on the Drama Theater after the evacuation. She could only assess the aftermath by videos and accounts of her acquaintances who survived the airstrike. “Most people who were affected were on the 3rd floor. I lived there myself—had I been there at the moment of the airstrike, I would have died on spot. So people who were sleeping in the assembly hall, and there were quite a few people there—elderly men and women… The 3rd floor was definitely damaged, as well as the center of the second floor. Not the sides because they are somewhat shielded. The bomb fell in the middle, right on the roof above the chandelier. And the sides are more or less intact. Those who were on the sides told me that they just got covered in dust. There were people in the auditorium. From the very start, I’ve been telling everyone to stay out of it because it’s very dangerous, because if a shell hits, the chandelier will fall on them. No one listened to me. So, I took at least some people and placed them near the wall so that, if anything happens, they would be somewhat safe. I was on the 3rd floor because I wasn’t particularly concerned about my own life. Also, I thought that if I hid in the basement, I would be taking the place of some child.“

There were about 300 people in the basement, it was packed. There were spots at the entrance to the basement, under the stairs. In the basement itself—in a tiny room—there were only children and mothers. Plus, people often came and went because it was tiring to stay there all the time. Women left—and new ones immediately came.

Plus, these drones… There was an inscription saying ‘CHILDREN’ in front of the theater. Our volunteers Zhenya and Seryozha wrote it.

You could see the damn inscription! It was visible even from the planes. They have drones after all, they didn’t just randomly drop that bomb. You could see it all! It said ‘CHILDREN’! How heartless do you have to be to do that? And even after they dropped the bomb, the guys who escaped from the theater told me: “Dasha, we were f***ing lying near the theater for several hours, and they kept dropping those f***ing bombs around the theater and on the theater itself!‘

So it was pure horror. If I hadn’t left that night, I would have simply died there under the rubble.“

Regarding the side responsible for the bombing, Dasha says: “We didn’t have our Ukrainian planes in Mariupol.

I asked our military: ‘Why aren’t you shooting, why isn’t there any response from us, why don’t you get in a fighter jet and drop bombs on these idiots, so that they felt what it’s like — to lose your loved ones, to lose people right before your eyes and to see these piles of corpses exploding around you?’

“I was told: ‘We don’t have planes.’ They didn’t even have any equipment! There were only a few tanks in Mariupol. When I was visiting the enlistment office, an officer told me: ‘We don’t have any damn weapons! We need volunteers, but we need weapons even more, because we don’t have enough!’ So, even trying to guess whose plane it was…“

Dasha says that there were no military personnel in the theater, let alone the allegations that, as the Russian Ministry of Defense claims, they set up a headquarters there and held people hostage: “We never had military personnel come and live with us. It never happened. Azov soldiers came twice and asked: ‘How are you feeling? Are there any wounded?’ The military brought us the field kitchen, they would bring us food and then leave. That’s all.

In the first few days, two military guys came to us, and when they found out that there were so many people in the drama theater, they simply checked how many people were in the basements and asked: ‘Do you have food and water?’ No one shot at us, no one did anything bad to us. At most, they told us—in the first few days, when we were hoping for a green corridor, the military told us not to even think about leaving. Because by then a convoy of cars got under fire. They told us it was very dangerous there. So, they really cared about us.“

When Dasha left Mariupol, she learned from her mother that her aunt and cousin had died in the city: “When I was already in Kyiv, after leaving Mariupol, she called me and said that my aunt Marina and Nastya absolutely refused to leave. And just as my mom was leaving Mariupol, a shell hit the house.” Dasha hadn’t been in touch with her mom since childhood; she was raised by her grandmother. She has no other relatives left.

“I don’t have my home anymore, or a family home; my sister, aunt, and grandmother are all dead. And that’s it. Now they’re telling us: ‘We’ve liberated you.’ Just like that.“

“Our guys kept count: 110 bombs in 22 hours. Tell me, can anyone survive that?”—Larisa spent about two weeks in the drama theater. She managed to preserve important photo- and video evidence of what was happening in the building before the airstrike.

Larisa, her mother, and her daughter arrived at the drama theater on March the 4th when their house on the Left Bank, near the Azovstal steel plant, was bombed. “While they were shelling us with Grad rockets, we stayed at home, but when they started aircraft bombing, it became impossible to stay even in the basements,” she says.

By that time, a significant number of people had already taken shelter in the drama theater, but there was still space in the basement—that’s where the theater actors accommodated Larisa and her family. “We removed seats from the auditorium to lie on top of them, because the floor was cold. Grabbed some chairs and dragged them into the basement, so that people could sit. But we later removed those so that everyone could lie down sideways. There were a lot of people. Men weren’t allowed into the basement because there was no space left. It was packed with children and women. There were some men on the floors, but just a handful.“

“Between the three of us, they would give us a plastic cup of about 400 grams [~14 oz]. That was all the food for us. There was nowhere to shower—if we chanced upon a drop of water, we could at least rinse our mouths, but mostly there was none. We all slept on the floor, wherever we could lie down.“

On March the 8th, theater staff prepared an improvised celebration of the International Women’s Day: they played the grand piano for 10 minutes. However, soon shelling started, and people had to return to the basement.

“Later, we stopped leaving the building because planes were flying, and a bomb could fall at any moment. The first close hit was next to the field kitchen: a large spruce fell, and three people or so were injured. So, no one would go out, people were even afraid to go up to the toilet.“

With each passing day, as the shelling gradually approached the city center, Larisa recalls the ‘residents’ of the Drama Theater becoming increasingly embittered: “It was becoming unbearable to stay there because there was no water, no food, people were becoming aggressive, everyone was waiting for a green corridor, but it didn’t open. So we decided: either we get bombed here, or we get out on our own. At first they bombed the outskirts, then they started closing in on the center, and bombs began dropping near the theater. We realized that the theater would be next. Although it had ‘CHILDREN’ written near it in white paint. Don’t bomb! But no one cared… If they even bombed a maternity hospital, then a theater for them is…“

On March 15th, Larisa decided it was time to leave Mariupol. She was in luck: her car was badly damaged, but at least it could drive. The doors wouldn’t close, the roof was dented, but the woman managed to start the engine. Larisa set off with others who also decided to evacuate from the city on their own. “At our own risk, we gathered and drove amidst mines, bombs, and shells. Through 11 checkpoints—there were Kadyrov’s Chechens, Caucasians, all sorts of people. Thank God, we made it through. We reached the Zaporizhia Bridge—but it was blown up. We started driving through some dachas, since the field was mined. We got lucky—we made it through. And some people behind us exploded. When we reached Zaporizhia, Grads were flying after us, and they wouldn’t let us through. Only after a while our [soldiers] realized that we were from Mariupol—they called the police, and the police escorted us to Zaporizhia. They met us, said, ‘Thank God, the first people from Mariupol made it out.’ That’s how we made it to freedom. But on this journey—200 km [125 miles] in 12 hours—all sorts of things happened, we even drove behind a Z-column for a while. I feel like an entire life has passed. We were running on pure adrenaline, it was very scary.“

The next day, the Drama Theater was shelled.

“When they say it was an inside job—no one blew it up. We had bombs flying and exploding every day. There were no military there at all. Except that we are grateful to them for the help, if they found provision somewhere, they would bring it to us. And even that didn’t happen every day. It was thanks to the military that we pulled it through—a box of cookies here, napkins for the children there, things like that. Planes flew in from Yeysk. Now they also fly in from Melitopol and Berdiansk. That’s where they scurry from. Our guys kept count: 110 bombs in 22 hours. Tell me, can anyone survive that? You can’t even imagine this horror when a bomb falls nearby and leaves a 6-meter [20 ft] crater. It’s impossible to sleep even in the basement because the ground is shaking. We even stopped caring about Grad strikes; it wasn’t as scary as air bombs. It’s unbearable. You wake up at night from the shaking. And there are children and the elderly. We tried to survive as best we could,” says Larisa. “There was a family we knew. The grandmother and grandson left, the mother also survived. But the father was gone, buried under debris. Whoever was at the field kitchen—they were all buried.“

Larisa’s brother stayed in Mariupol to look after their elderly parents. His house was also destroyed, despite making it through peak fighting. “Russian soldiers forced my brother out of his house. A tank pulled up to the house, they said, ‘3 minutes to get out!’ They came out, trucks pulled up, loaded some loot, and then they started shooting at the house from their tanks. They don’t show you this on your TV, do they? My brother’s wife’s parents are immobilized. Her father got a concussion. Because of this, they had to go to Bezimenne. Their house is destroyed. They can’t go back. They can’t leave either because of their immobile parents.

Larisa is currently abroad. “I will not return to Russian Mariupol. I simply hate Russia. I hate all of its people, because they are silent and do not rise up against it. If all of Russia had risen up, they could not have put everyone in jail. What infuriates me the most is how many relatives everyone has in Russia. Their relatives get slaughtered, and they all remain silent—is this normal? When we didn’t like our government, all our students rose up. And your students are silent.

I had a job and a home, my child was about to graduate, she had to prepare for college. And I was forced to flee, because otherwise they would have killed me there. Who should I thank for this ‘liberation’? That we must now wander without a home, without work, without anything. What’s most curious of all, these are supposedly fraternal peoples, fellow Slavs. What kind of brothers are you if you shoot [at us]?”

Part 5. Yulia Zakrasovskaya came near the drama theater two hours after the airstrike. She managed to capture a video of the subsequent shelling of the building, which Russian propaganda later labeled “fake news.”

On March 13th, Yulia first saw the bodies of people killed in the shelling—they were her neighbors. “On March 13th, there was a direct hit on our house. And it was the first time I saw dead bodies—our neighbors who were killed. Two of them were children. The police immediately took them away. As well as two bodies torn into pieces. 4 more bodies were left, because they had nowhere to take them. And our neighbors had to simply wrap them in blankets, they were completely broken. They lay in the yard for over a week. On the first day, I was completely hysterical and had a panic attack—I couldn’t even breathe when I saw them. On the second day, I took my phone and filmed them in our yard.“

Yulia, who lived two blocks away from the drama theater, also confirms the heavy shelling of the city center on the night of March 15th to 16th: “We slept in 15-minute spans between the flights of Russian planes because they hit really close.” Two hours after waking up, Yulia learned about the direct hit on the drama theater. Together with her son, she decided to go to her relatives’ house, which was located next to the drama theater—they had managed to leave the city and promised to leave food for Yulia and her son.

“On the way to the theater, we met a girl about 20 years old. She had empty eyes filled with terror. She was so disoriented she didn’t know where to go. She said she was in the theater and managed to run out and escape. I asked her, ‘Where are you going?’ She replied that she really wanted to go home to the Left Bank. The Left Bank is the outskirts of the city. I told her, ‘Child, what are you talking about? There’s no Left Bank anymore.’ She asked, ‘What else can I do? I’ve been hiding in the Drama Theater, waiting for evacuation—now there’s no theater and no people alive there either.’ She said they’d been making lists there to queue people for evacuation. There were over 1300 people there. Only about 200 survived. That’s according to her.“

Yulia took the girl to the nearest bomb shelter.

When Yulia arrived at the destroyed building—along with her son, an acquaintance, and another man who lived right next to the drama theater—she decided to turn on her phone to record the aftermath of the airstrike. The men tried to listen for cries for help and assist the victims under the rubble, but another air raid began.

“I’ve had 4 more attempts to record a video at the drama theater. We would drop down because of the raids, I would turn off the phone, then turn it on again. We only managed to approach the theater on our 4th attempt. In total, we spent about 20 minutes there. We tried to cross the road to reach the theater itself. It was very scary. But there could have been people. Other city residents were trying to rescue someone. My son and two more people I know, who are in the video, all tried to help and somehow pull people out from under the rubble. There was hope that someone survived there. In the end, an intense air raid began, and we had to run to the nearest bomb shelter. Apparently, the Russian bandits saw people reach for the theater, and they must’ve been trying to drive the locals away so that we couldn’t help people.“

“We didn’t hear any cries for help because shells were exploding nearby. And we only came there around 2:00 PM, hardly anyone could have survived so long after such a strike. We didn’t hear any cries for help or sounds, otherwise we would have gone back there. Then we spent 2 more hours in the bomb shelter. We needed to hurry home because the curfew started at 6:00 PM. We had to grab some supplies, find water and be back home by 6:00 PM.“

The man who appeared in Yulia’s video witnessed the airstrike itself. He lives opposite the central entrance of the drama theater. He didn’t go down to the basement on that day—he had his immobilized father to look after: “His apartment windows overlook the main entrance of the drama theater. He has an immobilized father, and he saw the strike itself because he was standing near the window, smoking. Then he saw Russian artillery shell the theater with smaller projectiles. He’s alive and currently in Mariupol.“

It’s impossible to contact him now—according to Yulia, people who remain in the city live in fear; they prefer not to talk about the war crimes of the Russian army.

“Right now people in Mariupol are very afraid of discussing this topic because everyone is subjected to harsh and cruel scrutiny by Russia and the ‘DPR’. That’s why people talk with great caution. We only discuss everyday topics with the neighbors who are still there, and in a very neutral tone. Otherwise, it’s dangerous for their lives. I write to my neighbors quite often. I got 7 cats out of Mariupol, but I couldn’t bring another one because we were fleeing the city during another airstrike. He ran away because of the intense sounds, and now I’m trying to find him. That’s why I’m constantly in touch with my neighbors, we exchange messages, but when I ask certain questions, they simply don’t respond. I’ve realized that those [questions] are simply off limits. Even in correspondence.“

After Yulia’s video went viral in social media, Russian propaganda labeled it “fake news”. Here’s what the pro-Kremlin outlet “Readovka” wrote about this video: “Today, Ukrainian channels are spreading a video allegedly shot immediately after the explosion at the Mariupol drama theater. The authors of the video, who instantly appeared near the building, are filming the destruction, commenting on it as if by rote—reporting false information about over a thousand people remaining under the rubble and blaming it all on the ‘Russian world.’ However, it’s been well known for a while what really happened in Mariupol. Nationalists from the Azov brigade (banned in Russia) forcibly detained a group of civilians and then blew up the building, trying to blame it on the Russian Armed Forces. Moreover, the Azovite provocation was known to be planned at the Mariupol Drama Theater three days before the explosion. There was no aviation strike, as survivors confirm, noting that the Ukrainians were bringing explosives into the building in large batches.“

Even Channel One [Russia’s largest TV station] analyzed Yulia’s video. “Experts” from Channel One claim that the sounds of airstrikes in Yulia’s video were added in post, citing the suspiciously calm behavior of the dog as evidence.

In the video, Yulia also accuses the mayor of the city, Vadym Boychenko, of neglecting to prepare for a possible Russian invasion over the past 8 years and failing to organize adequate bomb shelters. “In anger, I mentioned our mayor. My only complaint against him is that over all these 8 years, in a city located 20 kilometers [12 miles] from the demarcation line with its ongoing fighting, very few proper bomb shelters were prepared. That’s it. Have you seen the city before the arrival of the Russian ‘liberators’? Who ‘liberated’ some from life, others from a normal life, from their homes? We had a beautiful city, thanks to decentralization of power, which meant most of the money stayed in the city budget, and we could develop the city and make it wonderful. But it didn’t go as well with bomb shelters. There were very few good shelters where people could live and hide for several weeks. That’s why many people gathered in places like the Drama Theater.“

After the bombing, the city’s residents tried to clear the rubble on their own, searching for their loved ones, because by that time neither the utility services nor the police were functioning in the city.

Videos spread by the “DPR” media after the occupation of the city show excavators clearing up the theater ruins, indiscriminately digging through with their buckets. “Where are they taking the bodies, what are they doing? The only explanation for this is that they are trying to cover up the most heinous crime of the century that could have been possibly committed. What they’ve done to the theater is probably comparable to Bucha. Because they knew perfectly well that there were only civilians there, waiting for evacuation. With no homes left, because those were mostly people from the outskirts of the city. They wanted to escape, they were just waiting for a green corridor which those Russian bandits would not give. Trying to leave the city was a gamble—whether we’d get lucky or not. We don’t know if they even count the bodies. No one is being identified.“

“I know that the city is in dire need of drinking water, food and medicine. And in order to get the basic necessities, after painstaking screening, locals are being forced to clear away the rubble. They force us to throw the corpses of our fellow citizens into cars in order to get water and food. Do you see? It is even more horrifying than being shot at. It’s more morally humiliating. I cannot imagine how one can psychologically endure this. Filling cars with the corpses of your fellow countrymen, your neighbors—just so that they’d give you a piece of bread and some medicine.“

She also shared her own experience in an occupied city. After evacuating from Mariupol, Yulia found herself in Berdiansk and spent several days there before she was able to leave for territory controlled by Ukraine: “Communication was cut off, and only Russian radio and television were working. Every 15 minutes they repetitively broadcast zombifying announcements on the radio: ‘Dear residents of Mariupol, refugee camps have been set up for you here. You will be provided with everything you need…’ And by the third day, you realize that if you listen for a couple more days, you’ll start to believe what they’re saying. Because there is no other information. But we’ve had plenty of experience ‘communicating’ with them in Mariupol. I don’t mean personal, direct contact. So we were perfectly aware WHAT we were dealing with. But I can understand people who constantly exist in this information vacuum.

I have a photo where they put a sticker on a monument near the administration that said, ‘Russian occupier, get out.’ And they tried to remove it, to rip the sticker off with their teeth, but they couldn’t. Because it was glued on all four sides. That’s the Ukrainian people. They’ll go against tanks with their bare hands just to keep the occupiers out of their land.

And the Russians are now occupiers and cold-blooded cynical murderers. Some kill on our land with weapons in their hands, some kill with silence, and some by sitting in front of the TV and berating everything Ukrainian, mocking our grief. There is overwhelming grief across the country. We are at war. We are losing our lives, our arms, our legs, houses, relatives, friends.“

Sergey lived directly opposite the Drama Theater. He saw more and more people gather there since early March. And on March 16th, he personally witnessed the bombing.

Sergey recounts that people began coming to the Drama Theater on March 3-4. “There was a fire tank nearby—it’s two hatches near the wall facing Kuindzhi Street. I would go there to get water. Around 8 in the morning, whenever I came for water, I saw with my own eyes about 300 people who were warming tea, cooking food over fires. The drama theater had recently been renovated, and there were still planks left—so people cooked food on these planks. That was the beginning of March. There were a lot of people.

As the situation was getting more dire in the 23rd, 17th and Skhidnyy microdistricts, more and more people gathered. By March 9-10, I’d estimate there were about a thousand people in the theater. People came to the city center from all neighborhoods where active combat was taking place, because it was relatively calm there.“

According to Sergey, on March 9-10, hits began getting closer to the city center—there was mortar and artillery shelling, and constant air raids: “Planes flew in from the sea and from the direction of Novoazovs’k. On some days, planes came every 15 minutes. Considering those were single-family suburbs, they were clearly visible when they flew over the sea. Initially, they operated in the area of the Ilyich Plant, shelling ‘Azovstal,’ then strikes began in the center, and quite intense ones.“

On March the 9th, City Hospital No. 3 was bombed: “A bomb hit the courtyard of the hospital, there’s a U-shaped building, and everything there was blown apart. There’s a crater about 6 meters deep and 15 meters in diameter [20 by 50 feet].” Then they bombed the Communication House: “It’s as tall as a five-story building, and the central part thoroughly collapsed.” Next was a five-story building on Italiiska Street.

The day before the Drama Theater airstrike, the city center was already being actively shelled.

“On the night of March 15th to 16th, two mines hit the house across the road from me, near the Technical Lyceum. They hit the yards. And at night, from 4 am to 8 am, there was heavy artillery shelling. At 9 am, I was at the drama theater looking for a car to get out. It was quiet, the shelling had stopped. The water utility service brought a tanker right to the door of the theater because people were afraid to go out after the night shelling. So they were distributing water right there on the spot.

It was definitely a plane: you could hear it approaching from the mouth of the Kalmius River, from the direction of Azovstal [steel plant]. I saw it myself. The sound of the plane appeared literally 10 seconds before the attack, then you could hear the engine working, the plane was diving, and then—the explosion.

The missile hit the wall closer to Kuindzhi Street facing the railway station—where people were fetching water. Because some got buried right away, and then people started running from there. Completely covered with white dust, with construction dust from the collapsed wall, they started running along Kuindzhi, then turned onto Italiiska Street, then running along Metalurhiv Avenue they would reach Prymors’kyi Boulevard, and from there—towards the exit to Melekine. I estimated perhaps about 200 people.“

Immediately after the Drama Theater shelling, Sergey realized that even the city center had become extremely unsafe and decided to flee the city together with the people who survived the airstrike: “When they bomb a fairly large building 100 meters away—especially since there was a big inscription saying ‘Children’, it was visible… The letters were about 1.5-2 meters [5-6.5 feet] tall. There was one in front and one behind the Drama Theater. So, waiting for the next plane to come and bomb something else didn’t seem like an option. Within an hour, we packed our things and left. Because around March 12, a five-story building about a kilometer and a half [a mile] away from us was bombed, the Communication House was bombed, the hospital. And now the Drama Theater. I didn’t want to wait for something else to be bombed. My family and I went on foot. We reached the intersection of Haharina Street with Prymors’kyi Boulevard. There we twice came under mortar fire twice, miraculously we were not hit. Although people nearby were killed. After that a car picked us up. When we were leaving for Melekine, the Ukrainian checkpoint wasn’t there anymore. There was a destroyed tank and an armored personnel carrier. Ten minutes before that, Grad rockets hit the Melekine road. The fields around were on fire. But people had to get out because there were no other options. It was a long convoy of cars. People were driving at their own risk because there was no proper green corridor.” 

“The drama theater collapsed completely,” Sergey says, “because its roof was right above the auditorium. So if one wall got damaged, everything would just collapse. Imagine this: the drama theater is just one huge three-story room without any supports. It’s just a dome. And when one of the load-bearing walls was damaged, it all collapsed.“

“I talked to a nurse, she bandaged several people, and they left, just like us. No one knows how many people died there. But many did. Because the building collapsed, and I’m almost sure those who were on the upper floors all died. Plus there were those who were standing near the wall. It happened at 10 in the morning. Before that, there was no artillery shelling, it was quiet, and people came out to cook some food, boil water, etc.“

Sergey recounts that while he and his family were hiding from the shelling in a bomb shelter, a pregnant woman was brought in—right out of the bombed Mariupol maternity hospital: “We had a girl in the bomb shelter who had a week left before giving birth. They had taken her to the maternity hospital, and the next evening they brought her to us, injured by shrapnel. They transferred expectant mothers from the first maternity hospital to the third, only later taking them to the bomb shelters—for example, to the Markokhym House of Culture. And probably to the Stalin-era buildings along Myru Avenue. Because there were already too many people in the drama theater. People lived on the staircases.“

Sergey also confirmed that there were no military personnel in the drama theater: “Until about [March] the 12th, there was a patrol car parked there. The police provided [information] printouts to read and photograph. There were no military personnel in the drama theater itself.“

Regarding whose plane bombed the drama theater, Sergey says the following: “White planes often flew in and bombed. The Armed Forces of Ukraine don’t have white planes. The Ukrainian Air Force has a standard camouflage pattern, and it is not white. So I have no doubts.“

On June 29th, Amnesty International called the attack on the drama theater in Mariupol a war crime. Amnesty concluded that the theater was hit by the Russian military, who most likely dropped two simultaneously detonated 500-kilogram bombs from a fighter jet. The airstrike was most likely carried out by one of the fighters such as the Su-25, Su-30, or Su-34, which were based at nearby Russian airfields. This is what the investigation by Amnesty International states.

Here’s what Sergey says about it: “I am sure that missiles were used, not aerial bombs. The planes I saw were Su-30 or Su-34, definitely not Su-25. Looking from the ground, it’s easy to distinguish the profile of a Su-30/34 aircraft from the Su-25,” the man believes.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, stated on June 16th: “A Russian air attack on the Mariupol Drama Theater on 16 March stands out among the very deadliest and most emblematic examples of the harm caused to civilians. The theater had hundreds of civilians hiding inside with signs clearly marked ‘children,’ visible from the sky.“

According to AP estimates, the March 16th shelling of the Mariupol Drama Theater could’ve resulted in up to 600 deaths. Journalists from the agency rely on the testimony of 23 people— some of them had been sheltering in the theater from the bombings, others were involved in rescuing people from under the rubble.

All eyewitnesses interviewed by journalists said they saw no more than 200 survivors. They estimate that there were a thousand people in the theater at the time of the bombing. Witnesses interviewed by ASTRA claim that the number could’ve been higher: according to different estimates, the maximum number of people in the theater had reached about 2000, but on the morning of March 16th, people started leaving en masse, frightened by the intense night shelling.

At the time of the strike, no fewer than a hundred people were at the field kitchen near the theater—none of them survived.

However, according to Amnesty International, “at least a dozen people were killed by the strike.“

Russia’s Position

The Russian Ministry of Defense denies conducting an airstrike on the Mariupol Drama Theater. “According to reliable data available, the militants of the nationalist Azov brigade conducted another bloody provocation by detonating a theater building mined by them. Earlier, refugees who escaped from Mariupol reported that the Nazis from the Azov brigade could have held civilians hostage in the theater building, using the upper floors as firing points. Considering the potential danger to the lives of civilians, and the previous provocation by nationalists on March 9 with Hospital No. 3 in Mariupol, the theater building in the city center was never considered as a target for strikes,” the department reported on March 16th.

After CNN reported on Russia’s bombing of the Mariupol Drama Theater, the Russian embassy in the USA stated that they “categorically” reject these accusations and called journalists to “stop lying and start objective coverage of events in Ukraine.“

Here’s what Deputy Minister of Information of the “DPR” Daniil Bezsonov wrote the day after the bombing (he has 220 thousand subscribers on Telegram, and Russian media frequently quote him): “A relative of my close friend, who was yesterday in the Mariupol Drama Theater, wrote [him] after reaching Simferopol. He said that there were over a thousand civilians in the theater. Azov members had been setting explosives on the roof and under the roof. Before the detonation, Ukrainian militants of the Azov brigade allowed all civilians to leave the theater.” Bezsonov did not mention the name or surname of the “relative of his close friend.”

“Here the Nazi battalions staged a terrorist attack“—that’s how propagandists from RIA Novosti described the events at the Drama Theater after the city was captured.

Now the flags of the “DPR” are flying over the Drama Theater, and next to it stands a Ministry of Emergency Situations truck with a giant television screen broadcasting Russian TV. Propagandists from the “DPR” have been organizing tours of the Drama Theater for “high-ranking guests” from Russia, including journalists, preaching how as early as on February 22nd “Azov” allegedly set up their headquarters in the theater, and how Ukrainian nationalists “blew it up” with people inside.

Despite the accounts of dozens of eyewitnesses, despite the photos and videos indicating that there were no military personnel in the theater, and it was bombed from the air, in Russian textbooks, the shelling of the Mariupol Drama Theater will surely be described as “a detonation by Ukrainian Nazis.” History is already being rewritten: for example, at the “EyeZ of Donbass” exhibition in Simferopol, RT propagandist Yekaterina Gabel labeled photos as follows: “Stage of the Drama Theater blown up by Ukrainian nationalists.”

Author: Anna Snegireva