Some of the hundreds of people who had been sheltering in a Mariupol theater that Ukraine said was hit by a powerful Russian air strike are alive and are being rescued from the rubble, according to Ukrainian officials.
Sergei Orlov, the deputy mayor of Mariupol, told
the BBC that “most” of what he estimated was between 1,000 and 1,200 people seeking refuge in the building had survived.
Citing Ukrainian Parliament member Serhiy Taruta, the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture and Information
said in a tweet Thursday that the bomb shelter underneath the Mariupol Drama Theatre had survived the shelling and “people are coming out alive as the rubble is being cleared.”
The Mariupol City Council posted
a photo of the destroyed building to social media on Wednesday, saying that Russian troops “purposefully and cynically destroyed the Drama Theater in the heart of Mariupol.”
“The plane dropped a bomb on a building where hundreds of peaceful Mariupol residents were hiding,” the council stated.
The Epoch Times has evaluated the picture and confirmed that it’s of the theater in the city, but it has not been able to corroborate any other claims related to the incident, which Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba
called a “horrendous war crime.”
“The building is now fully ruined. Russians could not have not known this was a civilian shelter. Save Mariupol! Stop Russian war criminals!” Kuleba wrote in a post on Twitter.
The Russian Embassy in the United States
has denied shelling the theater, labeling it as “fake news.” It claimed that Ukrainian militants from the Azov battalion held civilians there as hostages and “committed a bloody provocation by exploding a mined cultural object.”
Rescue workers were continuing to search for survivors in the rubble of the theatre on Thursday, according to Reuters.
Satellite images of the theatre taken prior to the strike show a large structure with a red roof and the Russian word for “children” painted in large white letters on the tarmac at the front and back.
Mariupol has seen some of the fiercest bombardment of the conflict and remains encircled by Russian forces.
Roman Hryshchuk, a Ukrainian Member of Parliament, cited the deputy mayor of Mariupol
as saying that between 80-90 percent of the city has been destroyed and that “there is no building without damage.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine entered its 22nd day on Thursday, with British intelligence
indicating that Russian forces were mostly bogged down amid staunch Ukrainian resistance.
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