Last March, hundreds died in the bombing of the Ukrainian theater. Kyiv accused Moscow of targeting civilians who had fled into the building.
“The Mariupol Drama Theater no longer exists”, Ukrainian Culture Minister Oleksandr Tkachenko wrote on Twitter on Friday, who accompanies his message with a video where we can see an excavator demolishing a wall. This city in southern Ukraine has been occupied by the Russians since May.
For him “this is an attempt to hide forever the evidence of the deliberate murder of Ukrainians by Russians. The aggressor country is not even trying to hide its intentions to wipe everything out.”
The minister referred to the bombing of the Mariupol Theater last March, at the beginning of the conflict, when civilians were taking refuge there. The attack had been particularly criticized because the words “Children” had been written around the building to prevent any bombing.
According to local authorities, around 300 people died under the rubble of this building, but other estimates put the number even higher.
The Russians assure that the destroyed parts could not be restored
The bombing was “clearly a war crime,” Amnesty International said at the time. It is therefore obvious to the Ukrainian authorities that the Russians are destroying this theater in order to erase possible evidence of their crimes.
“These ruins were a problem for the Russians and served as evidence of their crime,” it read Twitter is a department of the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine. But “even without physical access to the scene of the tragedy, the Ukrainian and international investigators have sufficient grounds to conduct an investigation.”
The theater’s current director, Igor Solonin, assured Russian state media Tass that “only part of the building” was voluntarily destroyed because it could not be restored, and that the building will be renovated by the end of 2024.
The same article also notes that the destruction of the theater resulted from the shelling by Azov’s unit of Ukrainian fighters, who are regularly accused by the Russians.
Salomé Vincendon Journalist BFMTV