Survivors pulled from bombed theatre, but despair rises

KYIV • Two days after a Russian strike reduced to rubble a theatre in southern Ukraine where hundreds of people had been huddling for shelter, rescuers wading through the debris amid Russian shelling began pulling out survivors one by one.

Ukrainian human rights ombudsman Lyudmyla Denisova said yesterday 130 people had been rescued so far after Wednesday's air strike in the city of Mariupol.

"Rescuers are working. There is only this information: 130 people are alive and have been taken out. The rest are waiting for help," she said on national television.

"According to our data there are still more than 1,300 people there who are in these basements, in that bomb shelter," she said, referring to shelters below the theatre.

With at least 1,000 people, many of them children, reported by Mariupol's city council to have taken shelter at the theatre and still unaccounted for, fears remained that whatever hope emerged from the rescue scene would eventually be eclipsed by despair.

"Our hearts are broken by what Russia is doing to our people, to our Mariupol," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a public address late on Wednesday.

The rescue efforts at the theatre came against a fearsome backdrop of thousands of civilian casualties across much of Ukraine. Taking heavy losses on the battlefield, Russian forces have increasingly been aiming bombs and missiles at towns and cities.

Unable to capture urban centres, they are levelling them instead, and the toll on civilians is worsening.

In Mariupol, it was people sheltering in a theatre where the word "deti", meaning children, was written in huge letters on the pavement on both sides of the building, clearly visible from the air.

In Chernihiv, it was people waiting in a bread line.

In Kyiv, it was a 16-storey apartment building pierced by a missile fragment, and, amid the debris and broken glass outside, a man with a sweatshirt pulled over his head kneeling silently beside a body under a bloody sheet, holding a lifeless hand for several minutes before staggering away in grief.

As a fourth consecutive day of peace talks on Thursday yielded no announcements, and the United Nations Security Council held an emergency session on the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, Western officials portrayed the Russian advance as bogged down.

While Russian forces have made a bit of progress in the south and east, said one of the officials, they are stalled outside Kyiv, the capital, where they have taken heavy casualties and - perhaps most surprising - have failed to achieve dominance in the air. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence assessments.

Given all the setbacks, the Western officials said they were no longer confident that Russia planned a ground assault on Kyiv, a major objective.

"An ill-judged assault on a city as well prepared and well defended as Kyiv would be a very costly business," one said. They cautioned that Russia could still decide to assault the city or, failing that, strangle it in a prolonged siege.

As cruise missiles hammered their capital, Ukrainian fighters described several successful, if modest, counteroffensives against Russian forces.

To the east of Kyiv, in the suburban town of Brovary, the thrust of the counterattack focused on artillery, according to Lieutenant Pavlo Proskochilo, a military commander in the town.

He said Ukrainian artillery strikes had in some places forced the Russians to dig in, assuming more of a defensive than offensive posture.

"We hit them in the teeth," he said. "They are now waiting for reinforcements."

In recent days, an increasingly brutal war of attrition has been unfolding on the ground and in the air, with fierce battles raging in the suburbs of Kyiv, and Russian warships on the Black Sea launching missiles at towns around the southern city of Odessa. Eyewitness accounts, official statements and satellite imagery paint a picture of destruction on a vast scale. More than three million people have fled the country.

Kyiv city authorities said yesterday 222 people had been killed in the capital since the beginning of Russia's invasion, including 60 civilians and four children.

The UN rights office said yesterday that the national death toll was at least 816 civilians with 1,333 wounded in Ukraine from Feb 24 through to March 17. The real toll is thought to be considerably higher. US assessments have put Russian military deaths at 7,000, although the figure cannot be independently confirmed.

NYTIMES, REUTERS