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Officials: 300 dead in airstrike on theater in Mariupol

March 25, 2022
1 MIN READ
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About 300 people died in a Russian airstrike last week on a theater being used as a bomb shelter in the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol, the city’s government said Friday, citing eyewitnesses.

When the theater was struck on March 16, an enormous inscription reading “CHILDREN” was posted outside in Russian, intended to be visible from the skies above.

It was not immediately clear whether emergency workers had finished excavating the site or how the eyewitnesses arrived at the horrific death toll. Soon after the airstrike, Ludmila Denisova, the Ukrainian Parliament’s human rights commissioner, said more than 1,300 people had been sheltering in the building.

Mariupol has been the scene of some of the worst devastation of the war, which has seen Russia relentlessly besiege and pummel Ukraine’s cities. The misery inside them is such that nearly anyone who can be trying to leave and those left behind face desperate food shortages in a country once known as the breadbasket for the world.