During military operations on March 16th, 2022 Russian air forces launched several air attacks in the city of Mariupol in Eastern Ukraine. One of the attacks was conducted on a local theatre which was used as a shelter for civilians who were trying to find protection from the combat in the city. To show Russians that theatre is used as a shelter for civilians authorities wrote: “ДIТИ“ („KIDS“) in front of the building. Nevertheless, Russian pilots dropped several bombs on the buildings where approximately 1 200 people were hiding. That led to at least 300 people killed inside. The latest estimation from Associated Press speaks about 600 people dead.
Russian propaganda was trying to spread fakes about what happened in the theatre or underestimate the scope of destruction and life loss.
For example, Tsargrad.tv, which is well known for spreading conspiration theories and promoting quasi-Christian values (one of the contributors is Russian nationalist Dugin) quoted an “investigator” from the so-called “Donetsk Peoples Republic” who said that not the Russian bomb but the explosion from the inside destroyed theatre. This was and is a clear fake. Two weeks before spreading false information the research conducted by Amnesty International presented evidence (including interviews with survivors of the attack or satellite images) that attack was concluded by Russian air forces.
Earlier Russian Ministry of Defence was claiming that it was the Ukrainian military (namely Azov Regiment), who shelled the building. These claims were refuted by the commander of the Regiment Denis Prokopenko, who said:
“This is a lie and provocation. Our aviation was not conducting any operations in this area, so it could not do a strike like this. This is absurd. Russian bomb carriers were dropping the bombs. Our troops cannot do such an operation. When the strike on theatre was conducted we were holding the western and northern parts of the city. Our troops were there. The theatre was a parlance.”
Even after such a horrific attack, Russians conducted a concert in a partly destroyed building, still claiming that the attack didn’t come from an air strike but from the inside. It was not and still is not clear how many people died inside the building. Russian propaganda was saying that they won’t the rest of the building and that the claims about the opposite are “fakes”. But as the advisor of the major of Mariupol Andryushchenko stated in February this year theatre was destroyed.
It seems that this was the final step of the Russian occupiers to hide the evidence of how many people were buried under the building and the chances that we will find the truth are close to zero.
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