War in Ukraine: Nearly 300 killed in Mariupol theater attack

About 300 people were killed last week in a Russian airstrike on a Mariupol theater that was being used as a shelter, the government said. ukrainian on Friday. This is the deadliest attack on civilians known so far in the war.

On the other hand, in what could be the sign of a significant reduction in Moscow’s military objectives, the United States indicated that Russian forces seem to have stopped, at least for now, their ground offensive with which they seek to take the capital of Ukraine, Kyivand to focus more on the fight for control of the Donbas region in the southeast of the country, a change that the Kremlin seemed to confirm.

Colonel General Sergei Rudskoi, deputy chief of the Russian General Staff, said that the main objective of the first stage of the operation – to reduce the combat capacity of Ukraine– ha “been fulfilled in general”allowing Russian forces to focus on “The main objective, the liberation of Donbas.”

Moscow’s apparent change of stated war goals — after weeks in which the Russian president Vladimir Putin denied the right to Ukraine to exist as a sovereign country and seemed hell-bent on taking as many of its cities as possible and overthrowing its government—could reveal a possible exit strategy for Russia, which has been met with stiff resistance and more serious losses than anticipated. .

donbas is a region in the east of Ukraine where the majority of the population speaks Russian, where Russian-backed separatists have fought Ukrainian forces since 2014, and where many residents have expressed support for Moscow.

In Mariupol, the attack on the theater fueled claims that Moscow is committing war crimes by killing civilians, either deliberately or through indiscriminate attacks.

For days, the government of the besieged and ruined port city was unable to provide a figure for the number of people killed in the March 16 bombing of the huge Mariupolin which, according to reports, hundreds of people took refuge.

On the outside of the building was written in Russian the word “CHILDREN”, in large white letters to be visible from the sky.

In announcing the death toll on its Telegram channel on Friday, the city government cited eyewitnesses. But at the moment it is unknown how the witnesses calculated the figure or if emergency personnel had finished excavating the remains of the building.

Jake Sullivan, national security adviser to US President Joe Biden, said Friday that the theater bombing was a “absolute shock, especially given the fact that it was clearly a civilian target.” He added that the incident showed “blatant disregard for the lives of innocent people.”

The scale of devastation in Mariupolwhere there are unburied corpses among bomb craters and dilapidated buildings, has made it difficult to obtain information.

But shortly after the attack, the Ukrainian parliament’s human rights commissioner said more than 1,300 people had taken refuge in the theater, many because their homes had been destroyed. The building had an underground bomb shelter, and some survivors emerged from the rubble after the attack.

“This is a barbaric war, and according to international conventions, deliberate attacks against civilians constitute war crimes”underlined Mircea Geoana, deputy secretary general of NATO.