Mar 16: Russian Airstrike of the Mariupol Drama Theatre
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Mariupol Drama Theatre Airstrike
President Zelensky has posted to Telegram to commemorate a year since the Mariupol theatre bombing. Ukraine’s president wrote:
A year ago, Russia deliberately and brutally dropped a powerful bomb on the Drama Theatre in Mariupol. Next to the building was the inscription “Children”, which was impossible to overlook. Hundreds of people were hiding from the shelling there.
Step by step, we are moving towards ensuring that the terrorist state is fully held to account for what it has done to our country and our people. We will not forgive a single life ruined by the occupiers. We remember all those whose lives were taken by Russian terror.
A week after the incident, Ukrainian authorities put the death toll at as many as 300 people. The figure was based on the accounts of witnesses.
Reuters: December 6, 2022, Russia begins demolition of bombed Mariupol theatre.
Russian authorities in the occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol have begun demolishing most of the city's drama theatre, where Ukrainian authorities say hundreds died in an air bombardment in March.
Video posted on both Ukrainian and Russian websites on Friday showed heavy equipment taking down much of the building, while leaving its front facade intact.
Ukrainian officials denounced the demolition as a bid to cover up the deaths in the March 16 bombardment and wipe out Ukrainian culture. Russian officials said it was part of plans to rebuild the theatre in a city firmly under their control.
"The Mariupol Theatre no longer exists," Ukrainian Culture Minister Oleksandr Tkachenko wrote on Facebook.
"The occupiers are removing traces of their crimes and couldn't care less whether this is cultural heritage or whether it belongs to another culture."
James Verini, Witness to the Massacre in Mariupol- NYT Magazine
Elyzaveta Fatayeva was sitting on a blanket in the basement, next to her boyfriend, when the theater exploded above her. The whole building convulsed, and she with it. Her ears filled with a tremendous crashing sound. Her eyes squeezed shut for a moment. When they opened, the air was a cloud of masonry dust. She gasped it in and choked. When her breath returned, there was a ringing in her ears. Then silence. Then people around her coughing. Then yelling.
She looked around for her boyfriend. His face emerged from the dust. She could make out his eyes, and they were wide with terror — “like a crazy person’s eyes,” she thought.
They stood up. Another face appeared through the dust, a man’s. It was smeared red. He was yelling. She couldn’t hear him, until she could.
“Everybody get upstairs!”
The stairwell was a welter of whitened people. Some sat, bleeding, dazed, while others struggled to climb. Getting up the stairs felt to Elyzaveta “like forever.” A man on the landing above was screaming. Him she understood at once. [continue reading]
Serhiy, Valeria, and Karolina: how they escaped
Before the war, Serhiy was a metal worker and about to retire. He was looking forward to spending his days fishing in front of Mariupol’s Azovstal steel works and spending time with his two young granddaughters, Valeria and Karolina.
The family slept on the cold floor of a drama theatre costume room, but on the morning of the attack moved to the cellar, where others had covered the floor with soft padding ripped out of seats and armchairs.
Daily rations for those sheltering in Mariupol’s drama theatre was a cup of boiling water, soup for lunch and hot water with a biscuit for dinner. “It was enough to survive and not die of hunger,” said Serhiy. People came from all around and queued for hours for the soup.
On the morning of the Mariupol drama theatre attack - March 16, 2022 - Serhiy’s son, Oleksandr, and some neighbours went to help prepare the day’s rations for everyone in the theatre. At some time after 9am, people heard a plane fly over.
Then there was a huge explosion.
The explosion was so powerful it threw Serhiy three metres across the room and ripped off the cellar doors. Everything was now coated in chalky plaster dust, the air was thick with smoke. Below was only rubble - Serhiy assumed walls had collapsed. He knew he had to get out.
“There was so much blood everywhere. Just ahead of me, two men dragged another out of some rubble. Both his feet had been blown off, his boots were held on only by his skin. There was no bone left,” said Serhiy.
On the landing, he found his wife and Valeria. A neighbour’s child, 10, shouted “The men have gone… they’ve all been crushed.” That’s when Serhiy realised his son Oleksandr and neighbours were dead.
“They were under so much rubble you couldn’t hear any cries,” said Serhiy.They soon realised the drama theatre’s costume room was also gone - Serhiy’s daughter-in-law and youngest granddaughter had been in there cleaning. Karolina was just 2. Valeria, 8, kept shouting: “Mummy, Daddy, my dear little sister… I will never see you again.”
The plane was still circling above the drama theatre so they knew they had to leave. They got out and tried to flag down passing cars. Serhiy said his wife was so traumatised she wanted to throw herself in front of one.
They managed to get to Ukrainian-held territory in Zaporizhzhia and start the long hard process of rebuilding their lives with nothing. Instead of retirement, Serhiy and his wife are now parents to Valeria, who is back in school as they try to resume some normality for her.
The people who lost family in Mariupol’s drama theatre have had no closure - no bodies to bury, no justice for the heinous crime of bombing a civilian shelter clearly marked ‘children’. They can only try to rebuild their lives, knowing those guilty are still attacking.
I am proud to have contributed to this @guardian report that documents how the siege of Mariupol played out, the bloodiest and most shocking chapter of the war in Ukraine so far. I hope that one day there will be justice for the people of Mariupol.
Staff, How Russia Adjusts Hostilities to Its Propaganda. The Mariupol Theatre Case- Sprotyv.Mod
An investigation by the Associated Press (AP) has found evidence that a deadly attack inside and outside the building led to about 600 deaths. The investigation also refutes claims by the Russian Defense Ministry that the theatre had served as a Ukrainian military base and had been blown up from the inside by “militants” of the Azov Regiment.
Propagandist Steshin has been actively spreading misinformation and calls for the genocide of Ukrainians in his Telegram-channel “Russkiy Tarantas” and newspaper “Komsomolskaya Pravda” since the beginning of the aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine.
Thus, on March 12, 2022, Steshin spread an allegedly anonymous “warning” about the preparation of a terrorist attack to discredit Russia in his Telegram-channel. The screenshot made by Steshin is saved for the future tribunal as evidence if he deletes it.
The message states that the Ukrainian authorities intend to carry out two provocations with numerous civilian casualties to discredit the Russian Federation in the eyes of the international community. [continue reading]
DISINFO: Ukrainian Nazis Used Tanks to Shoot at Drama Theatre in Mariupol- EUvsDisinfo
Disproof
Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narrative about Nazi Ukraine, in the context of Russia's unjustified military invasion of Ukraine.
On March 16, 2022 an airstrike hit a theater sheltering hundreds of civilians in the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol. Rescuers worked to pull out survivors, finding 130 by March 17, 2022.
The claim alleging the responsibility of "Ukrainian Nazis" was provided with no factual evidence. Such claims are also in contradiction to other Russian claims, including assertions that Azov batallion was sheltering in the building.
Known formally as the Azov Special Operations Detachment, the group with affiliation to far right wing groups began as a paramilitary unit called the Azov Battalion in 2014 , when Ukraine had to hastily gather an army to defend against Russian-led fighting in its eastern Donbas region. The unit numbered around 900-1100 soliders. Although it was just one among dozens of volunteer militias, Azov was quickly instrumentalised by the pro-Kremlin media to claim that the entire Ukrainian armed forces, now with around 200.000 personel, is "neo-nazi". The unit was integrated into the National Guard of Ukraine in 2015. Since its integration, Azov regiment members have repeatedly denied being a far-right political unit, although they acknowledge that it includes individuals with such views.
While Russia provided no credible evidence that Azov batallion was behind the theater attack, multiple news accounts reported on the strike, quoting Ukrainian officials who attributed the destruction to a Russian bombing (see here: CNN, The Guardian, Al Jazeera).
In both Ukraine and Syria, the Kremlin also has a history of false claims that opponents conducted “false-flag” attacks against themselves or their own civilians to blame Russia.
Read the full Polygraph debunk here.
