Mariupol City Council, who shared an image of the destroyed building, said Russian forces had “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,” it said.
CNN has geolocated the image and confirmed it is of the theater in the southeastern port city. The word “children” was spelled out on two sides of the theater before it was bombed, according to satellite images.
Videos of the aftermath showed a fire raging in the theater’s ruins. The number of casualties is unknown, authorities said.
“It is still impossible to estimate the scale of this horrific and inhumane act, because the city continues to shell residential areas,” the council wrote on Telegram. “It is known that after the bombing, the central part of the Drama Theater was destroyed, and the entrance to the bomb shelter in the building was destroyed,” it added.
Petro Andruishchenko, an adviser to the mayor of Mariupol, described the theater as the largest shelter “in number and size” in the city’s center. “More than a thousand people were hiding there” but “the probability of getting there to dismantle the rubble is low due to constant shelling and bombing of the city,” he said.
Military strikes also hit a building that houses the Neptune Pool, just over four kilometers (approximately 2.5 miles) from the theater, according to videos shared by a local official. Its authenticity has been confirmed by CNN.
Maxim Kach, a Mariupol city government official, said the building was for civilians, with only women and young children hiding within it and not military personnel.
He said rescue workers were busy trying to get a pregnant woman out from under the rubble. CNN has not been able to verify that information.
Source : cnn
