The “majority” of civilians sheltering inside a makeshift bomb shelter in a Mariupol theater that was struck by Russian fire on Wednesday have survived, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office. “After an awful night of not knowing, we finally have good news from Mariupol on the morning of the 22nd day of the war,” Serhiy Taruta, the former head of the Donetsk region, posted on Facebook. “The bomb shelter was able to hold. The rubble is beginning to be cleared. People are coming out alive.” Constant shelling had made it difficult to reach the flattened three-story building, the mayor of the city said early Thursday, but survivors started emerging from the rubble mid-morning. As many as 1,200 people were thought to have used the theater as a shelter in the last week, with authorities clearly writing the Ukrainian word for “children” on the sidewalk outside to ward off an attack. Russia, nevertheless, allegedly struck the building. It is not known if any of those sheltering in the theater had evacuated on Wednesday when 20,000 people fled the besieged front-line city, which has been a focus of Russian aggression due to its strategic location.
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