Ukraine war: ‘Hundreds’ trapped in rubble of Mariupol theatre

Hundreds of people are feared trapped under the rubble of a theatre in the devastated city of Mariupol after it was bombed by Russia, as evacuees tell of the ‘hell’ they have been subjected to at the hands of Vladimir Putin‘s men.

Serhiy Taruta, a Ukrainian politician, said that around 130 people had been rescued from the building but hundreds of others are unaccounted for – possibly buried under rubble in one part of the bomb shelter, and cannot be evacuated because rescue services have been destroyed by Russian troops.

‘No one understands. Services that are supposed to help are demolished, rescue and utility services… are physically destroyed. A lot of doctors have been killed. This means that all the survivors of the bombing will either die under the ruins of the theater, or have already died,’ he wrote on Facebook. 

Dmytro Gurin, a Ukrainian MP from Mariupol, told the BBC that some people have managed to evacuate but that others are trapped in the shelter and rescuers are struggling to reach them because Russian troops continue to shell it. A rescue mission is underway, he insisted. 

Meanwhile survivors of the siege who managed to flee described the city as ‘hell’, saying that people are being left to bleed or burn to death in the streets because doctors cannot reach them and hospitals have been destroyed, with the bodies covered by a thin layer of soil in makeshift burials.

Russia’s defence ministry said on Friday that its troops have now entered the city and are fighting in the centre, amid fears that it could soon fall into Putin’s hands after three weeks of shelling weakened the defences. If the city does fall, it will be the largest captured so-far – albeit at the cost of near-totally destroying it. 

Svitlana Zlenko, who said she left the city with her son on Tuesday this week, described how she spent days sheltering in a school building – melting snow to cook pasta to eat while living in constant terror of Russian bombs which flew overhead ‘every day and every night’.  

She described how a bomb hit the school last week, wounding a woman in the hip with a piece of shrapnel. ‘She was lying on the first floor of the high school all night and prayed for poison so that she would not feel pain,’ Svitlana said. ‘[She] was taken by the Red Cross within a day, I pray to God she is well.’

She added: ‘There is no food, no medicine, if there is no snow with such urban fights, people will not be able to go out to get water, people have no water left. Pharmacies, grocery stores – everything is robbed or burned.

‘The dead are not taken out. Police recommend to the relatives of those who died of a natural death, to open the windows and lay the bodies on the balcony. I know you think you understand, but you will never understand unless you were there. I pray that this will not happen again in any of the cities of Ukraine, or of the world.’

Despite the pleas, shelling was well underway in other Ukrainian cities on Friday – with Lviv, in the west of the country, the capital Kyiv, and Kharkiv, in the east, coming under fire.  

The war launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin ground into its fourth week as his troops have failed to take Kyiv – a major objective in their hopes of forcing a settlement or dictating the country’s future political alignments.

Missiles and shelling struck the edges of Kyiv as well as Lviv, close to Ukraine’s western border with NATO countries such as Poland.

Late Thursday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nighttime video address to the nation that he is thankful to U.S. President Joe Biden for additional military aid but won’t say specifically what the new package includes because he doesn’t want to tip off Russia.

Foreign ministers of the Group of Seven leading economies meanwhile said in a joint statement that Russian President Vladimir Putin is conducting an ‘unprovoked and shameful war.’

The fighting has led more than 3 million people to flee Ukraine, the U.N. estimates. The death toll remains unknown, though Ukraine has said thousands of civilians have died. 

The Ukrainian air force’s western command said that six missiles were launched at Lviv from the Black Sea, but that two of them were shot down.

The city’s mayor, Andriy Sadovyi, said the missiles hit a facility for repairing military aircraft near Lviv’s international airport, also damaging a bus repair facility. No casualties were immediately reported. The facility had suspended work ahead of the attack, the mayor said on the Telegram messaging app.

Early morning barrages also hit a residential building in the Podil neighborhood of Kyiv, killing at least one person, according to emergency services, who said 98 people were evacuated from the building. Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said 19 were wounded in the shelling, just north of downtown Kyiv.

Two other people were killed when strikes hit residential and administrative buildings in the eastern city of Kramatorsk, according to the regional governor, Pavlo Kyrylenko.

Civilian casualties have been mounting. The United Nations says that so far it has recorded 780 killed and 1,252 injured, although it estimates actual casualties are much higher. It says that most of the civilian casualties were due to explosive weapons with a wide impact area, such as heavy artillery and multiple-launch rocket systems as well as missile and air strikes.

Ukrainian officials say thousands of civilians have been killed.

The World Health Organization has verified 43 attacks on hospitals and health facilities, with 12 people killed and 34 injured, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the United Nations Security Council in a virtual briefing Thursday.

The besieged southern city of Mariupol has borne much of the bombardment. There, rescuers continue to search for survivors of a Russian airstrike on a theater where hundreds of people were sheltering, local officials said.

With communications disrupted across the city and movement difficult because of shelling and other fighting, there were conflicting reports on whether anyone had emerged from the rubble.

Video and photos provided by the Ukrainian military showed that the building had been reduced to a roofless shell, with some exterior walls collapsed. Petro Andrushchenko, an official with the mayor’s office, said the building had a relatively modern basement bomb shelter designed to withstand airstrikes.

Russia’s military denied bombing the theater or anyplace else in Mariupol on Wednesday. 

Meanwhile, Britain’s Defense Ministry said Thursday that Russia’s invasion ‘has largely stalled on all fronts’ amid stiff Ukrainian resistance. It said Russian forces have made ‘minimal progress’ on land, sea or air in recent days, and are suffering heavy losses.

Ukrainian forces are using inexpensive Turkish-made drones to carry out lethal attacks on the Russian invaders. 

The United Nations political chief, Undersecretary-General Rosemary DiCarlo, also called for an investigation into civilian casualties, reminding the UN Security Council that international humanitarian law bans direct attacks on civilians.

She said many of the daily attacks battering Ukrainian cities ‘are reportedly indiscriminate’ and involve the use of ‘explosive weapons with a wide impact area’.

Ms DiCarlo said the devastation in Mariupol and Kharkiv ‘raises grave fears about the fate of millions of residents of Kyiv and other cities facing intensifying attacks’.

In Mariupol, hundreds of civilians were said to have taken shelter in a grand, columned theatre in the city’s centre when it was hit on Wednesday by a Russian airstrike.

More than a day later, there were no reports of deaths and conflicting reports on whether anyone had emerged from the rubble.

Communications are disrupted across the city and movement is difficult because of shelling and other fighting.

Satellite imagery on Monday from Maxar Technologies showed huge white letters on the pavement outside the theatre spelling out ‘CHILDREN’ in Russian – ‘DETI’ – to alert warplanes to the vulnerable people hiding inside.

‘We hope and we think that some people who stayed in the shelter under the theatre could survive,’ Petro Andrushchenko, an official with the mayor’s office, told The Associated Press.

He said the building had a relatively modern basement bomb shelter designed to withstand airstrikes. Other officials said earlier that some people had got out.

Video and photos provided by the Ukrainian military showed that the at least three-storey building had been reduced to a roofless shell, with some exterior walls collapsed.

Across the city, snow flurries fell around the skeletons of burned, windowless and shrapnel-scarred apartment buildings as smoke rose above the skyline.

‘We are trying to survive somehow,’ said one Mariupol resident, who gave only her first name, Elena. ‘My child is hungry. I don’t know what to give him to eat.’

She had been trying to call her mother, who was in a town 50 miles away. ‘I can’t tell her I am alive, you understand. There is no connection, just nothing,’ she said.

Cars, some with the ‘Z’ symbol of the Russian invasion force in their windows, drove past stacks of ammunition boxes and artillery shells in a neighbourhood controlled by Russian-backed separatists.

Russia’s military denied bombing the theatre or anyplace else in Mariupol on Wednesday.

In Chernihiv, at least 53 people were brought to morgues over 24 hours, killed amid heavy Russian air attacks and ground fire, the local governor, Viacheslav Chaus, told Ukrainian TV on Thursday.

Ukraine’s emergency services said a mother, father and three of their children, including three-year-old twins, were killed when a Chernihiv hostel was shelled. Civilians were hiding in basements and shelters across the embattled city of 280,000.

‘The city has never known such nightmarish, colossal losses and destruction,’ Mr Chaus said.

The World Health Organisation said it has verified 43 attacks on hospitals and health facilities, with 12 people killed and 34 injured.

In remarks early on Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he was thankful to US President Joe Biden for additional military aid, but he would not get into specifics about the new package, saying he did not want Russia to know what to expect.

He said when the invasion began on February 24, Russia expected to find Ukraine much as it did in 2014, when Russia seized Crimea without a fight and backed separatists as they took control of the eastern Donbas region.

Instead, he said, Ukraine had much stronger defences than expected, and Russia ‘didn’t know what we had for defence or how we prepared to meet the blow’.

In a joint statement, the foreign ministers of the Group of Seven leading economies accused Mr Putin of conducting an ‘unprovoked and shameful war’, and called on Russia to comply with the International Court of Justice’s order to stop its attack and withdraw its forces.

Both Ukraine and Russia this week reported some progress in negotiations. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Thursday that some negotiators were breaking into working groups.

Mr Zelensky said he would not reveal Ukraine’s negotiating tactics.

‘Working more in silence than on television, radio or on Facebook,’ Mr Zelensky said. ‘I consider it the right way.’

While details of Thursday’s talks were unknown, an official in Mr Zelensky’s office told the AP that on Wednesday, the main subject discussed was whether Russian troops would remain in separatist regions in eastern Ukraine after the war and where the borders would be.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive talks, said Ukraine was insisting on the inclusion of one or more Western nuclear powers in the negotiations and on legally binding security guarantees for Ukraine.

In exchange, the official said, Ukraine was ready to discuss a neutral military status.

Russia has demanded that Nato pledge never to admit Ukraine to the alliance or station forces there.

The fighting has led more than three million people to flee Ukraine, the UN estimates. The death toll remains unknown, though Ukraine has said thousands of civilians have died.