Mariupol Theater – “It was intentional, it was targeted murder” – News


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It is not known how many people died in the bombing of the theater on March 16, 2022. But: There were many. A survivor tells.

Rehearsal in the Uzhhorod Theater, a small town in western Ukraine. The program includes a play for children. It tells the story of a duck searching for the meaning of life. One of the actresses is 65-year-old Vira Lebedinska. She has an elegant appearance, wears a subtle perfume, some jewelry – Lebedinska is an artist, no question. When she tells her horrific story, she mostly remains composed.

She lived and worked in Mariupol when the Russians advanced right at the beginning of the major invasion and put the city under constant fire: from land, sea and air. Lebedinska says: “I went to the theater on March 3rd. I hadn’t left the city, I didn’t know that Mariupol was surrounded. When a bullet hit my apartment and there was no water, no electricity, no heating, I understood: the apocalypse was here. I had to leave because otherwise I would have been buried under rubble and no one would have ever found me.”

The singer and actress packed the essentials, took her cat Gabriel with her and set up in the music room of the drama theater – her place of work. She was joined by a colleague and her family. The chamber was in the basement; the building’s thick walls gave her a feeling of security, said Lebedinska. Soon the rumor spread that people were being evacuated and that people had to report to the theater. And soon more and more people came from all parts of the city: “We opened the doors and they streamed in. Over a thousand people came and sat down in the boxes on the third, second and first floors, at the back entrance, everywhere. There were an awful lot of people.”

Suddenly the cat’s fur bristled

People began to organize themselves. Vira started cleaning. There were only a few toilets and no running water. Volunteers brought food and clothes taken from bombed stores. Helpers set up a field kitchen outside. And in order to be able to cook, people began to burn the furniture.

«I said to them: What are you doing, it’s a theater! But they waved them away, and within two days all the chairs were gone and the hall was empty.” Then the frost came, minus 10 degrees. People kept leaving the theater, trying to escape the city, and others took their place. And then came March 16th.

Suddenly the cat’s fur stood on end: “I heard the sound of an airplane and then… ‘biiii’. Then: a huge explosion. Followed by: Silence. We didn’t understand anything, there’s never been such a loud explosion before.”

Only then did they hear cries for help. The colleague’s husband went upstairs, came back and said: The theater is no longer there, we have to get out immediately. They managed to leave the building, but had to climb over corpses because the roof and three floors had collapsed onto the main hall and the stage, killing all the people. How she managed to leave the city, scantily dressed and completely distraught, is another terrible story.

Dead people, refugees, deportees


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For eight weeks, Russian forces bombed and shelled Mariupol, ultimately defeating the Ukrainian troops. Thousands of uninvolved people were killed and an estimated 400,000 residents fled the city. Countless people were forcibly evacuated to Russia, including many children. Some of them have now been illegally adopted in Russia. Numerous men disappeared in Russian filtration camps.

Those left behind had to survive for months without electricity, running water or medical care. Satellite images show that after the fighting ended, 93 percent of multi-story residential buildings in central Mariupol were destroyed, as were all hospitals and almost all schools.

But now Vira Lebedinska is in Uzhhorod, has found work and is still on stage. She can only afford a room in a dormitory and still says: She doesn’t complain, she thanks God for it.

“It was intentional, it was targeted murder.”

But she can’t get rid of her memories. What also dismays them is the fact that even in Mariupol there are people who believe the lie about Russian innocence: “They called me and said that the Ukrainians blew up the theater from the inside and that the explosives were there in boxes brought. I can not understand this. Yes, volunteers brought us boxes, but there was food in them, like chocolate.”

Lebedinska says: There were actually people in Mariupol who were waiting for the Russians to arrive. The city was partly Russian in character and was inhabited by former Russian military personnel. According to Lebedinska, people will only hear what they want to hear.

Mariupol in the midst of the Russian war of aggression

To this day it is not known exactly how many people were killed in the air raid. Lebedinska says: At times over a thousand people lived in the theater and it was known that people found refuge there. They even put up a lettering – here are children – which was visible from the air. She couldn’t say how many victims there were, but there were a lot of them: “It was intentional, it was targeted murder.”

How does it look today?


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It is not known how many of the victims of the air raid on the theater were recovered and buried. There is evidence that this rarely happened. The occupiers later built gigantic partition walls around the ruins of the theater to shield them. The posters featured Russian writers as part of the policy to Russify the city. Later, most of the ruins were demolished and the theater is now being rebuilt. It is scheduled to reopen in 2025. So people want to sing and dance again at the scene of the crime.

The occupiers have renamed streets and squares; Freedom Square is now called Leninplatz again. Many of the broken houses were demolished. They also disposed of the unrecovered bodies and the personal belongings of those who had fled and been killed. This mixed up the traces of Russian crimes because independent experts were never able to investigate the location of the events.

At the same time, there is a lot of construction going on, Russian companies are building new apartment blocks and making a lot of money from them. Abandoned, still somewhat intact apartments and businesses that belonged to those who were killed or fled were expropriated and are being rented out or sold. Russia is trying to attract as many Russians as possible to Mariupol in order to make the city’s Russification irreversible. At the same time, everything Ukrainian will be erased.

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