The Post spoke to seven people who were in the Mariupol theater building in the 24 hours before it was hit in what Ukrainian authorities said was a Russian strike.
This satellite image provided by Maxar Technologies on March 19, 2022 shows the aftermath of the airstrike on the Mariupol Drama theater in Mariupol, Ukraine. Its walls were thick and sturdy. People had packed into the basement, foyer and the dressing rooms backstage in the hope of escaping Russia’s bombardment of Mariupol, Ukraine’s coastal city that President Vladimir Putin appears set on seizing at any cost.
Lyudmyla Denisova, Ukraine’s human rights commissioner, has said police records show 1,300 people were registered in the building. But in the 48-hours before the strike, evacuations had begun. One survivor, Mariia Rodionova, 27, who had been sleeping there despite the danger, said that around 50 people were in that part of the building. She said she went outside to get water for her dogs just moments before the strike.
She thought her eardrum had ruptured from the deafening sound. “There was a man with his face down in a pool of blood,” she said. “Next to him was a woman trying to wake him up.”She said she desperately tried to find a way into the hall to get to her dogs and her first aid kit. “I went around a couple of times,” she said. She said she became panicked.“I didn’t know where to go,” she said. “To go into a bomb shelter, what’s the point? It was a shelter. I just understood I had to leave.
Vladislav, 27, got there on the morning of the bombing to check if it would be a safer spot for his family.“We knew there was food there,” he said. Police and military dropped off supplies. There was a fire hydrant that people used for water. They cut down a nearby fence for firewood to cook on. “I followed people out,” he said. A video posted online on Friday showed people covered in dust on a stairwell in the theater, including a woman carrying a young baby.He waited 15 minutes in the basement before fleeing on foot to Melekyne.
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