War in Ukraine | Two survivors recount the bombing of the Mariupol theater

(Lviv) They both survived the bombardment by the Russian army of the theater of Mariupol, on March 16, the building having collapsed on several hundred people taking refuge inside. Two weeks later, they tell AFP the “horror” experienced.

Viktoria Dubovytsky was inside the theater, roofless, debris and wounded everywhere. Maria Koutniakova, she saw everything from outside, while her mother and sister remained in the building.

These two residents of the besieged city of Mariupol, now refugees in Lviv (west), tell AFP the minutes before and after the strike on March 16, which Kyiv attributed to Russia.

For weeks, the humanitarian situation has been catastrophic in this city of 450,000 inhabitants, where 160,000 people are still trapped, suffering from lack of food and from the cold.

refuge theater

To avoid hunger, cold and above all the shelling, Viktoria had taken refuge in the drama theater on March 5, thinking that she would then find a place there in an evacuation convoy for her two-year-old daughter, Anastassia, and her 6-year-old son, Artyom.

The day had been calm, the two children were playing near their mother when the bomb crashed on this important place of culture. Viktoria, thrown against the wall and injured in the face, immediately heard her son scream, but not her daughter.

“That was the scariest moment, when you think she’s gone. You hope she’s armless or legless, but at least she’s alive,” the 24-year-old mother told AFP, holding her daughter in a shelter in Lviv, New York. west of the country, where all three have since found refuge, alive.

According to satellite images of the theater, consistent with testimonies collected by AFP, the word “deti” (“children” in Russian) had been painted in large white letters in front and behind the theater.

Authorities said 1,000 people were inside at the time of the strike, mostly women and children. If the balance sheet remains uncertain, the bombing would have killed 300 people according to the town hall citing witnesses.

“Everyone knew that there were children in the theater, even my husband with whom I no longer had contact because there was no longer a network”, protests Viktoria. The latter, who was working in Poland at the start of the war, came to pick them up in Mariupol after the strike.

“Common Grave”

Like Viktoria, Maria Koutniakova, communication manager of a business incubator start-up from Mariupol, hoped to join with his mother and sister a humanitarian convoy in front of the drama theatre.

The family had exhausted their food and water supplies, much of it destroyed along with their kitchen and bathroom by a strike on March 10, which also killed their neighbour.

The theater was the starting point for evacuations by humanitarian corridor, but also a rallying point for individuals wanting to try their luck in their own convoys, according to the two residents of Mariupol.

Russia says soldiers from the Nationalist Azov Battalion were in the building. However, the two witnesses assure AFP that no soldier was present in the theater at the time of the strike.

“The soldiers came once a day to announce whether there would be a humanitarian corridor and left immediately,” says Viktoria, who specifies that only once, four Ukrainian soldiers spent the night there, after a nearby bombardment.

On March 16, Maria, her sister and her mother moved to the third floor of the theater, due to a lack of space on the lower floors or in the basement.

Having gone to fetch water from her uncle next to the building, Maria heard the plane flying then the bomb being dropped.

“When I approached, I saw that the theater no longer had a roof, the debris and the wounded in the square,” she recounts, still stunned, from a theater in Lviv where she found refuge. after 13 days of a long journey.

Inside, a cacophony of shouting first names amid the rubble. So the 30-year-old screamed her last name, to find her sister and her mother who “miraculously” survived.

As with Viktoria, Maria got stuck in the theater after the strike. “Outside the Russians continued to shoot and inside the building was burning”, laments Maria, who finally ran to another improvised refuge at the Philharmonie, a little further, also bombed the same evening.

Homeless and without shelter, the family decided to embark on a risky journey “to finally be in a place where the ceiling won’t fall on our heads”.

Leaving Mariupol, Viktoria especially understood the extent of the destruction. The bodies lying in the middle of the rubble, sometimes small wooden crosses planted in this desolate setting.

“When people find their loved ones, they just bury them where they can, sometimes where roses used to bloom,” she says. “Now the city is a common grave for everyone. »