A theater where hundreds of people had taken shelter in Mariupol was bombed on Wednesday, according to local authorities, as hundreds of thousands of people remain trapped in the coastal Ukrainian city that has been encircled for weeks by Russian forces.
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.
“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.
“According to preliminary data, more than a thousand people were hiding there,” he said.
“The probability of getting there to dismantle the rubble is low due to constant shelling and bombing of the city.”
The city has no electricity, water, food, with residents melting snow or dismantling heating systems for a drop to drink, he said on Tuesday.
Mariupol has been besieged by Russian forces since March 1. After weeks of failed attempts to establish safe civilian evacuation corridors, about 20,000 people managed to leave the city on Tuesday, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk said.
The theater attack comes just a day after a Ukrainian official accused Russian troops of holding some 400 people captive at Mariupol’s Regional Intensive Care Hospital.
As many as 2,500 civilians have died in Mariupol, Ukrainian officials estimate, and hundreds of thousands of people are trapped in the city.