Witness to the Massacre in Mariupol | The New York Times Magazine

Elyzaveta Fatayeva was sitting on a blanket in the basement, next to her boyfriend, when the theater exploded above her. The whole building convulsed, and she with it. Her ears filled with a tremendous crashing sound. Her eyes squeezed shut for a moment. When they opened, the air was a cloud of masonry dust. She gasped it in and choked. When her breath returned, there was a ringing in her ears. Then silence. Then people around her coughing. Then yelling.

She looked around for her boyfriend. His face emerged from the dust. She could make out his eyes, and they were wide with terror — “like a crazy person’s eyes,” she thought.

They stood up. Another face appeared through the dust, a man’s. It was smeared red. He was yelling. She couldn’t hear him, until she could.

“Everybody get upstairs!”

Her cat was crouched on the floor, its claws digging at the concrete. Her mother pried him up and put him under her arm before the three of them rushed toward the stairwell. They could see only dust and the shapes of moving bodies, but they had gone this way so many times in the last 10 days, since they fled the siege of Mariupol to shelter in the basement of the Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theater, that they could have found the stairs with their eyes closed.

The stairwell was a welter of whitened people. Some sat, bleeding, dazed, while others struggled to climb. Getting up the stairs felt to Elyzaveta “like forever.” A man on the landing above was screaming. Him she understood at once.

“There is no more theater!”

She stumbled out into the freezing air on the building’s eastern side. Where the roof above the main auditorium had been, there was now a yawning opening to the sky. Minutes earlier, there had been a field kitchen here. A crowd had been around the cooking fires, preparing the midday soup. Elyzaveta’s mother had just been fetching water. Now the edifice was collapsed, and there was a smoking hill of rubble where the kitchen had been. Children stood before it, wailing.

Elyzaveta refused to look at them. She refused to look anywhere, knowing that, if she did, she would pass out: “I was in a stupor, frozen.” She wanted to cover her ears with her hands and block out their wails but realized she was holding the cat. Her boyfriend was next to her; her mother was not.

More explosions. Shattering glass and whizzing shrapnel. The Russians were shelling around the theater. Someone yelled, “Lie down!” Elyzaveta and her boyfriend dropped to the ground and covered their heads. When they stood up, her mother was there again. They ran around the theater to the main entrance, where they found a chaotic mob of people who had been sheltering alongside them. Some raced away in panic; others wandered in a daze. Smoke seeped from the building’s upper floors and the basement. Elyzaveta’s family and these other evacuees had managed, against every adversity, and with almost no official help, to turn the theater into an outpost of humanity in the midst of the siege of Mariupol. In moments, it was all gone.

No one knows how many Ukrainians were crushed beneath the rubble, burned, killed by shrapnel or blast waves or asphyxiated in and around the theater. The estimates of dead I heard from survivors ranged from 60 to 200, but The Associated Press found that it could be up to 600. With Mariupol in Russian hands, it’s unlikely that a real accounting of the dead, or for that matter any on-the-ground investigation of the bombing, will take place.

Later, Elyzaveta asked her mother where she had disappeared to. Reluctantly, her mother told her: When she got outside, following Elyzaveta, she had seen a woman’s bloodied face in the rubble. The woman was pinned under a slab of limestone. Elyzaveta’s mother went to the woman. She and a boy tried to pry the slab off her. It was too heavy. She had to go.

She looked into the pinned woman’s petrified eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and ran off.

As Russia’s war on Ukraine enters its seventh month and the world’s interest in it inevitably diminishes, the destruction of the Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theater demands our attention. Before it was bombed, the theater was home to the largest sanctuary in Mariupol for residents fleeing the Russian siege. In the roughly three weeks that this improvised, citizen-led shelter existed, its inhabitants worked together to keep one another alive. As news of what was happening there spread across Ukraine, it became a national symbol of hope and resistance. When it was destroyed, it became the site of the single most lethal act of violence against Ukrainian civilians since Russia invaded on Feb. 24.

The theater stands out from a war that in its short duration has taken thousands of lives. It also stands out from the siege of Mariupol, a city assaulted like no other in Ukraine. Mariupol is the starkest proof yet of Russia’s willingness to commit humanitarian atrocities in the course of a war that it claims is meant to save Ukrainians from themselves, and the theater, the worst known atrocity of the siege, offers an unobstructed view into Russian motives and methods. It is difficult to imagine Russian forces didn’t know what they were doing when they destroyed the theater, where the temporary residents had painted the Russian word for “CHILDREN” so large on the ground outside that it could be seen in satellite imagery. An Amnesty International report calls it “a clear war crime.”

“That day, we realized the Russians had come to kill us,” is how one survivor put it to me. “They didn’t come to fight with Ukrainian soldiers. They just wanted to kill us.”

The Drama Theater, as the people of Mariupol typically referred to the building, was bombed between 10 and 11 a.m. on Wednesday, March 16. The exact time is uncertain, as is the exact means. According to an analysis of photographs taken after the bombing that was included in the Amnesty International report, the most plausible case is that a Russian warplane dropped two 1,100-pound bombs onto the theater. They pierced the roof more or less simultaneously and detonated in the main auditorium, at about stage level, possibly with the aid of delayed-action fuses. The extent of the damage suggests two detonations, which would have sounded like one to the people in the theater. It is possible that there was only one bomb, but the shape and size of two debris fields extending from the theater to the northeast and the southwest would seem to argue against that. Also possible, though much less likely, is that Russian forces launched a cruise missile into the theater.

I began interviewing survivors in March, in a hospital near Mariupol, where they were being treated, and I have continued to interview them since. What follows is an account based on their experiences, as well as those of others who witnessed the theater’s destruction.

Elyzaveta, a sprightly 19-year-old, had lived all her life in Mariupol, which is roughly 40 miles from the Russian border. She shared an apartment with her mother in Zakhidnyi, a small residential district in the western part of the city, and worked in a supermarket, saving for college. In her spare time, she acted in plays. When the invasion began, Elyzaveta believed that the Russians were saber-rattling. Since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and backed a short-lived insurgency in Mariupol, the city had been on the front line between Ukraine proper and territory seized by Russia-backed separatists, the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic. For more than half her life, the two sides traded fire. It never amounted to anything. President Vladimir Putin of Russia was tyrannical, Elyzaveta believed, but not reckless — at least not so reckless as to actually invade. It was a conviction she shared with almost every Ukrainian I’ve spoken with.

What Elyzaveta didn’t know was that Russian forces in their thousands were converging on Mariupol from three sides and the skies above. The 810th Separate Naval Infantry Brigade approached by sea, the 150th Motorized Rifle Division crossed the border from Russia and troops descended from the Donetsk People’s Republic. Russian jets flew bombing sorties, and warships launched missiles. Ukrainian fighters from at least four different brigades, battalions and regiments defended Mariupol, but they were outnumbered and outgunned.

By the end of the first week of March, Mariupol was encircled. The Russians pushed in toward the city center, shelling the main railway station, power stations, police and fire stations, water and gas supplies, cellular towers and other forms of infrastructure and survival. They pulverized apartment blocks and homes and shopping districts. Soon there was no running water, electricity, gas, phone service or internet in most of the city. With no water, fires jumped from building to building. The Ukrainian government had declared martial law. Online, the mayor assured residents that the city government would remain intact and protect them. But then he left Mariupol, and the city became, as one theater survivor put it to me, “a vacuum.”

The windows in Elyzaveta’s apartment were blown out. When air-raid sirens sounded, she and her mother raced to the hallway outside their apartment to escape flying glass and shrapnel. The morning of March 5, Elyzaveta’s boyfriend, a university student, came to the apartment. Word had got around that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to open a humanitarian corridor out of the city. Bus convoys were convening in the plaza outside the theater. Her mother put clothing and dry food into handbags. Elyzaveta wrangled her cat, Zhmenia, which means “handful,” into her bag.

The Mariupol they walked through was unrecognizable. Whole streets were charred to cinders, lined with the ashen shells of cars and buses. Shops were shuttered or looted clean. A few brave people huddled around bonfires outside. The rest huddled in basements. The rocket fire was endless.

Elyzaveta had been to the theater many times, but when they arrived at the building, three hours after setting out, she found a scene unlike anything she’d ever witnessed. An immense, nervous mass of people and sputtering cars had assembled in the plaza in the frigid air, waiting on the promise of a humanitarian corridor.

What there was not at the theater was a convoy of buses. There was not a single bus. The crowd waited for hours. In the afternoon, the police arrived and made an announcement: There would be no convoys today. Maybe tomorrow.

Those who could returned to their homes. Others, like Elyzaveta, knew they’d left their homes for good. The theater would have to become their home.

The same day Elyzaveta moved into the theater, March 5, so did several hundred other people. After the police left, she went inside. “I could barely move,” she recalls.

To understand how extraordinary that is, you must know how large the theater was. Built on the site of a church that was destroyed by the Soviet authorities, the theater opened in 1960 after four years of construction. One of the largest and grandest buildings in Mariupol, it was the very picture of Soviet monumental classicism. The exterior was of Crimean limestone. On the facade, which contained the main entrance, was a Corinthian colonnade, three stories high. This was topped by a tympanum containing a pedimental scene of metallurgists, farmers and muses. Inside, a grand atrium gave onto the main auditorium, which, including two loges and opera boxes, sat 800 people in all. From the ceiling hung a 1,500-pound glass chandelier with 121 bulbs. A smaller performance space sat 60 people. In the basement and on the upper floors were dressing rooms, costume and scene shops, offices and storage areas.

Most wartime shelters I visited in Ukraine held a dozen to several dozen people. The largest held a few hundred. The largest shelter for Ukrainian war refugees I ever saw, in a shopping mall in Poland, was home to perhaps 700. According to several survivors, the theater would eventually host as many as 1,500 people.

Outside its main entrance was the plaza, and on its eastern, northern and southern sides was a park. The whole area was known as “Drama.” In the heart of the Tsentralnyi district, it was a popular gathering place. In the summer, there were outdoor concerts. Couples would meet at Drama and walk down to Prymorskyi, the seaside district, with its strand along the Sea of Azov. In the winter, when the theater was strung with lights, there was a Christmas market and an ice-skating rink.

Elyzaveta and her family walked through the theater, stepping around and over people. The atrium, the hallways, the corridors, the dressing rooms and the offices were already full to bursting with people. They sat or lay on the floor. They had dismantled the seats in the auditorium, using the cushions to make mattresses and pillows. Body odors and the must of unwashed clothing thickened the air. The basement, the safest part of the theater, was packed, too, but they found a small niche in a wall. It was stuffed with scrap metal. Elyzaveta and her boyfriend pulled out the scrap and lay down a wooden palette. They covered that with wastepaper and then blankets.

Mykhailo Hrebenetskyi and his wife, Nataliia, arrived at the theater the same day as Elyzaveta. They drove from a town north of Mariupol, where Nataliia worked at the railway station. Mykhailo, who went by Misha, had recently had a tumor removed and wasn’t yet strong enough to return to work as a taxi driver. When shelling began near their home in the first days of the war, Misha and Nataliia didn’t want to wait around to see what would happen next. They drove to Mariupol, where their son, Yevgen, was an assistant machinist in the Azovstal steelworks, in the eastern part of the city. They moved into his apartment near the plant.

After the first rockets rained down around Yevgen’s home, they held out for a week, until the police told them of the humanitarian corridor and the theater. They packed clothing and a small amount of food into Misha’s taxi. As Misha drove, a coolant tube in the car burst. The car stalled outside the theater. Misha tried to find a mechanic in the crowd but couldn’t. When the police came to the theater and made the announcement about the cancellation of the corridor, Misha and his family took their luggage into the theater. They hoped they would leave the next day.

New arrivals at the theater were warned not to stay in the auditorium, which was covered by a stretch of ceiling that would easily collapse if the theater was hit. Unable to find anything else, Misha decided to take his chances. He found a spot in a side aisle, near an exit, hoping that they could make a run for it if they had to. Yevgen looked up at the chandelier. What a disaster it would be if it fell.

Staying near Elyzaveta in the basement was Vira Lebedynska, the musical director at the theater and an opera voice coach at Mariupol Music College. She was from Donetsk, where she had lived under the occupation of Russia-backed separatists before fleeing to Mariupol. On the first day of the war, a friend offered Vira a ride out of Mariupol. She declined, explaining that she couldn’t possibly prepare her cat for the journey at such short notice. She went to work at the theater that morning, believing, like her co-workers, that the fighting would end soon. Three days later, she found herself sleeping in a hallway as her neighborhood fell around her, and she kicked herself for not taking the ride. With her cat, Gabriel, she moved into the theater’s sound-recording studio.

Dmytro Plaksin had found a space in a stockroom. Like Vira, he was a music teacher, though of a less formal sort, giving private lessons around Mariupol and supplementing that with cryptocurrency mining. Dmytro had played in public concerts during the Euromaidan movement that precipitated the Russian invasion of 2014, and when this new war began, he tried, without luck, to join the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces. The day he got to the theater, a shell landed nearby, and people bolted in panic. “I saw the fear and confusion in their eyes,” Dmytro told me, “and I realized I could help these people.”

He got his chance when he met Evgenia Zabogonska, a lighting designer at the theater. On the first full night of the invasion, Evgenia and her daughter came to the theater, knowing it would be one of the safest places in the city to sleep. They were two of only a handful of people there that night. Earlier in the day, the city government posted online a list of public shelters that included schools, a cinema, a gym, the philharmonic theater and the drama theater. But no one from the government came to the theater to oversee it. Nor did anyone from the military. The director of the theater was trapped in a village outside Mariupol that was cut off by the Russians.

Evacuees started arriving, some with luggage, others with only the clothes on their backs. Some had driven or gotten rides; others had walked. Many were women, children and the elderly. They were receiving no assistance. Evgenia lived near enough to the theater that she could return home during the day to eat and bathe, but within a few days, she told me, “I realized that someone had to stay and help.”

Evgenia had no experience of caring for people on this scale, never mind for a population of displaced and traumatized people that multiplied by the day. What she did know was the theater, where she had worked since she was a teenager. She knew every room, every closet, every passageway.

Her husband, Sergiy Zabogonskyi, an actor, joined her. The theater’s janitorial manager followed him, moving into the theater with her family. They joined Vira in the recording studio. Next came the office administrator, two security guards and a group of actors. The theater’s chief engineer lived nearby and wanted to pitch in. Dmytro offered his services, as did more volunteers from among the shelterers. Now Evgenia had a staff.

Though the government had left the shelter to fend for itself, police officers and soldiers with the Territorial Defense Forces came often to help. They brought food, medical supplies, mattresses, clothing, toilet paper, toys for the children — whatever they could find. People emptied their cupboards and pantries and root cellars. A volunteer team of shelterers, known as the Searchers, roamed the streets and scavenged among the looted markets, shops and pharmacies.

It was too dangerous to make fires inside the theater, and initially the authorities wouldn’t allow them outside either. The chief engineer had to carry food to his apartment, cook it and carry it back to the theater. But when the theater got crowded, the rule was relaxed. After the bus stop on the plaza was shelled, loosening the paving stones, the theater’s residents built fire pits along the exterior on the building’s eastern side, laying pieces of metal fencing and wire mesh over them. A firewood team collected fallen branches from the park and dismantled the walls of the skating rink. In the basement were filing cabinets full of paperwork and actors’ résumés and headshots. These became bedding as well as kindling.

In the basement were the remains of a restaurant that had been planned for years but never opened. It had been stripped of its furniture and fixtures and cookware, even of its wall tiles. But when he was rummaging in a nearby restaurant, Sergiy discovered a pair of deep freezers. The owner came and gave the freezers to Sergiy with his blessing, along with cookware. Word of what was happening at the theater had spread through Mariupol, and people wanted to help. Soldiers brought a diesel-powered generator to the theater to power the freezers. Now there was a field kitchen. Running water in the theater had gone out with the rest of the city, but the theater had a dedicated mobile water tank in case of fires. It was parked outside the main entrance. When I asked Evgenia whether it had made her nervous, taking on the responsibility of housing and feeding so many people in the midst of a siege, she said that, in fact, it was “exciting.”

A cook offered his services. Ukrainians are great ones for soup at any time of year, and having worked in restaurants in Mariupol for years, he knew his way around a soup. Tradition aside, there are reasons soup is suited to a shelter in the winter: It’s hydrating, warming, can be kept hot for hours, can be eaten without implements and can be soaked up with bread, which the cook was able to bake fresh over a fire pit when he could find flour. Sometimes frozen meat or seafood found their way to him. One day, a load of squid materialized. Another chef, one who’d worked in France and Italy, tried to assist the cook but couldn’t adapt to the conditions and quit.

In the mornings, boiling water was doled out for making tea and coffee. Soup was served at midday. To avoid making people wait outside in the below-freezing air, Evgenia and Sergiy set up a food window in one of the cloak rooms in the atrium, overseen by a team of volunteers. Another team oversaw the registration of evacuees, writing their names in longhand in a ledger. A volunteer ran the supply stockroom, which was moved backstage after overflowing a dressing room, and gathered and organized spare clothing. Volunteers swept up the glass shards from the windows that shattered with the blast waves and plugged the window frames with plywood. The full volunteer corps eventually numbered more than 40. The theater doors were locked at sundown, though the authorities dropped off evacuees at night.

In the scene shop, the trash team found a 200-liter metal drum, a prop from a play, “Maidan Inferno,” about the protest movement. During the play, a bonfire was simulated in the drum. The trash team took it outside and burned garbage in it, an inviting task compared with what faced the toilet team: There were bathrooms in various parts of the theater, but nothing close to enough to serve the needs of the population, especially without running water. The bathrooms were also where people washed their dishes and cups. The toilet team collected snow in plastic bottles and melted it inside the theater in an effort to clean, but as one volunteer bluntly put it, “The toilets were always full with shit.” Vira, the musical director, who was on the team, said, “We could at least clean our feet with wet napkins.”

Between the copious bacteria and the cold temperatures, sickness spread fast. People came down with colds and flus, and there was a coronavirus outbreak. When a physician moved into the theater, she set up an infirmary in a dressing room. In the three weeks between the start of the war and when the theater was destroyed, not one person died, as far as I could find. Victoriia Dubovytska, a mother who was staying in a hallway outside the auditorium, had a 2-year-old daughter who got food poisoning (many people did) and then pneumonia. It could easily have killed her. The physician found her antibiotics and watched over her closely, and the girl survived. To keep her daughter warmer, Victoriia moved her family into a spotlight booth in a loge of the auditorium.

One day, Elyzaveta left the theater to go to a market. A few had stayed open in Mariupol, amazingly, including one about a half-mile from the theater that sold goods through a window. While she was there waiting in the line, a shell landed near the market. Word got back to the theater, and Elyzaveta’s mother began screaming her daughter’s name and collapsed. The physician talked her down and gave her a sedative.

People arrived at the theater with chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes. Although his tumor was gone, Misha Hrebenetskyi, the taxi driver, was still weak from the surgery. Still, he insisted on volunteering in the field kitchen and brought his wife, Nataliia, and son, Yevgen, extra food when he could. Yevgen and Nataliia took turns waiting in the food line. Leaving the spot in the auditorium aisle, they moved into an opera box to the right of the stage, which they shared with another family.

When he wasn’t working in the field kitchen, Misha was outside at the car, trying to fix the coolant tube and warding off the gas scavengers who roamed Mariupol siphoning tanks. He, Nataliia and Yevgen discussed trying to escape Mariupol on their own. Families were doing this. It was dangerous, but it could be done. Misha thought he could patch the tube enough to carry them about five miles. This would get them out of the city but not much farther, and he admitted that he wasn’t well enough to continue long on foot after that. What would they encounter? The city was surrounded. Any way they went, they would be stopped by Russians. There were stories of abductions and interrogations, of evacuees being forcibly taken to Russia, even shot. They decided against escape for the moment.

A volunteer hung her battery-powered radio outside a dressing room. Yevgen and others gathered around it for news of the war. They also read circulars, printed by the military, that soldiers dropped at the theater. With the wartime restrictions on information, the circulars weren’t terribly informative. The faces of the soldiers said more. “You could see from their mood how the war was going,” Elyzaveta says.

There was a man living in the theater who had studied psychology and who tried to help people with the inevitable panic attacks and depression and insomnia. But he, too, began to burn out. Dmytro Plaksin, the volunteer, recalled the man coming to him overwhelmed, hands shaking.

After that, Dmytro made a point of helping shelterers with their problems. He was always calm and warm. His mood never seemed to dip. When I asked him how he managed this, he explained that 18 years earlier, he left the church and later became a Hare Krishna. “I believe in God and karma and eternal life and reincarnation,” he told me.

Dmytro served variously as a grief counselor, activities coordinator and mediator. He prayed with people. He helped resolve disputes. He played guitar and the concert piano, a half-century-old Estonia, that was on the stage. He asked men to leave spots in safer parts of the theater, like the basement or near load-bearing walls, to make space for women and children, though it fell to the night security guards living in the theater to turn people away. Some showed up belligerent, some drunk. Some visitors asked too many questions. Dmytro thought they might be Russian agents. One day, he was called to the main entrance. A group of oddly dressed people were on the plaza, acting peculiarly. He heard that they were patients who’d wandered over from a nearby psychiatric hospital.

The only differences that didn’t come Dmytro’s way were the political ones. Like most cities in eastern Ukraine, Mariupol is Russian-speaking and had residents who were deeply Russophilic. Even after the war of 2014, many of them favored the government in Moscow over the one in Kyiv. Those who didn’t, including most survivors I spoke with, still tended to have close familial ties to Russia. Vira spoke with her sister in Russia after the invasion began. Vira said to her, “Do you understand that bombs are flying over our heads, that you are killing us like the fascists did?” Her sister refused to discuss it. Vira told me, “She didn’t want to hear the truth.” Another survivor had family in St. Petersburg. When she called them as the war began, they assured her it was a “safety operation.” Her uncle invited her to move to Russia. She would be happier. The Ukrainian government was a puppet of the United States and Europe, and the United States and Europe were bad, he said. Russia was good. When she described the shelling, her uncle replied, “That’s your imagination.”

Witness to the Massacre in Mariupol | The New York Times Magazine

Survivors describe the defining atrocity of the war in Ukraine.

The Banality of Brutality | Organized Crime and Corruption￼￼

Zelensky says Russia prevented independent journalists from observing the I.A.E.A. mission | New York Times

Related

The Banality of Brutality | Organized Crime and Corruption