In their effort to erase all vestiges of Ukraine from the city of Mariupol, Russian authorities started to demolish the city's historic Drama Theater on Thursday. The theater served as a bomb shelter until twin March 16 Russian airstrikes killed hundreds.
The AP investigation drew on interviews with 30 residents from Mariupol, including 13 living under Russian occupation; satellite imagery; hundreds of videos gathered from inside the city, and Russian documents showing a master plan. Taken together, they chronicle a comprehensive effort to suppress Mariupol’s collective history and memory as a Ukrainian city.Mariupol was in the crosshairs of the Kremlin from the first day of the invasion.
An AP analysis of satellite imagery taken over the past eight months of occupation shows 8,500 new graves in the outlying Staryi Krym cemetery alone, with possibly multiple bodies beneath each mound. There are at least three other trench gravesites around the city,In all, a total at least 10,300 new graves are scattered around Mariupol, according to AP’s methodology, confirmed by three forensic pathologists with expertise in mass graves.
This is how those who remained in Mariupol learn their buildings are scheduled for imminent demolition. Often, despite shattered windows, frozen pipes and no electricity, they are still living inside because they have nowhere else to go. But Petro Andryushchenko, an aide to Mariupol’s mayor who is exiled in Dnipro, believes the real reason is to ensure that people don’t see the rotting corpses being hauled away. He said many of the buildings, especially in the neighborhood around AzovstalThose deaths will go unrecorded.
. As AP journalists watched and recorded from the upper floor of nearby Hospital No. 2, one tank raised its gun at 110 Mytropolytska and fired. “I live in Mariupol, this is my home,” she said, speaking by candlelight in a café in Dnipro, another city that had lost power. “This house was my fortress, and they took it away from me.”
The majestic Drama Theater became the city’s main bomb shelter until twin Russian airstrikes hit on March 16.and residents said the site reeked of bodies all summer. To mask the ruins, Russian authorities put up a screen so tall it can be seen from space, etching the theater’s outline on the paneling in a ghostly reminder of its previous life.
Videos show no furniture visible in the windows of the new apartments and few people on the sidewalks outside. Only pensioners, the disabled and those affiliated with the occupation seem to be getting them, according to multiple people still in Mariupol. “There is no more Russian city now than Mariupol,” Dmitry Sablin, a Russian lawmaker born in Mariupol, said in an interview with Russian media in June after visiting the city.
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