‘That Day, We Realized the Russians Had Come to Kill Us’
NEWS | 12 May 2026
For 62 years, the Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theater was among the most spacious and sturdiest structures in Mariupol. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and laid siege to Mariupol, the building became an enduring emblem of the city’s resistance. Actors and artists swiftly converted the Drama Theater into a shelter for civilians. Images of the shelter slipped the Russian choke hold to appear on the world’s screens—intact and unbowed amid the rubble, like a temple time-transported from some more ancient siege, the faces of those within drained but resolute. Then, on March 16, a Russian air strike left a blast radius where the theater had been. The world viewed the satellite imagery with horror, almost in real time. The theater’s deliberate destruction was among the first, and may yet prove the single worst, acts of mass civilian killing in Russia’s war on Ukraine. What remains of Mariupol today is still occupied by Russia, or is simply Russian, depending whom you ask. The ruins of the theater have long since been carted away. No forensic investigation was ever undertaken at the site, unless it was undertaken by Russians, which is unlikely. Maybe one day the archives of President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin will be opened as those of the czars and the Soviets were, and we will learn more about what happened that day at the theater. But for Ukrainians, the message was clear. “That day, we realized the Russians had come to kill us” is how one theater survivor put it to me. “They didn’t come to fight with Ukrainian soldiers. They just wanted to kill us.” In the months and years after the bombing, I tracked down every survivor I could, traveling across Ukraine and the rest of Europe to hear the stories. Their stories amount to the fullest accounting we will ever get of one of this war’s defining atrocities. Olena Matiushyn, a physician, moved into the theater on March 5 with her daughter, Olha. They had been sheltering with Olena’s mother since the siege began, but her apartment building had taken a direct shell hit that shattered its windows. Olena and Olha covered the holes with blankets, to little avail: The temperatures were frigid, they had no power or gas, and they’d already run through their drinking water and food. Olena knew if they stayed any longer they would be killed. Isaac Stanley-Becker: The hardest job in Europe Olena’s mother refused to abandon her home. She reminded Olena and Olha that she’d been expelled from Mariupol once before, as a girl by the Germans. She would not be prey to the vagaries of history again: The Russians could bomb Mariupol to the ground if they liked, but if they wanted this apartment, they would have to drag her corpse from it. Olena’s husband, Ihor, came to get his wife and daughter. He was a playwright on the board of the theater, so he was able to secure his family two offices on the second floor, off of the staff lounge, where 10 families were now bunked. At the beginning of the siege, Ihor became a volunteer policeman, tasked with keeping order in a city that was becoming more lawless by the day. The scene of chaos that greeted his family at the theater worried him. The day of this move, at 9 a.m. a temporary cease-fire was to go into effect in Mariupol, as was a humanitarian corridor along the Zaporizhzhia highway, by which civilians could evacuate the city. The theater had been designated as a pickup location. A crowd began forming in front of it shortly after dawn. By noon, people numbered in the hundreds. Cars filled the parking area and the surrounding streets, and more arrived all the time. But the promised convoy of buses never came. In fact, neither a single bus nor any authority figure was there to explain what was happening. The temperature was close to freezing. Faces and fingers went numb. Ill children sniffled and wailed. Olena viewed them with worry; as a doctor, she could tell that many urgently needed medical attention. As the hours passed and still no buses arrived, people got frantic. The sun would set soon and the curfew would take effect. Where were they supposed to go then? Why weren’t they being told anything? Rumor took wing. Probably no evacuation had even been arranged, someone hazarded—the government just wanted to make them feel good. Maybe Kyiv had made the announcement because it wanted to pretend to the world that it had the ability to negotiate with the Kremlin, which would never agree to a cease-fire. Or maybe Putin had agreed but now was sabotaging it. At dusk, one of Ihor’s fellow police officers pulled onto the square in a cruiser. He got out and announced that there would be no evacuation that day. The crowd converged on him, demanding answers. He had none to give. “Come back tomorrow,” he told them. The de facto leaders of the theater shelter, a lighting designer named Evgenia and her husband, Serhii, an actor, had watched all day as the crowd grew larger and more restless. They’d kept the doors locked, opening them only for the refugees who were already staying there, and for the elderly and children. Now the police officers asked Evgenia and Serhii to open the theater so that people could at least come in and warm up before heading back to their home, if they still had a home, or more likely to their basement. Before Evgenia and Serhii had time to consider this, a barrage of rockets sailed in. An air-raid siren sounded. The crowd rushed past Evgenia and Serhii, who stood there like two pier pilings in a hurricane. The siren quieted, and after a while, some of the thwarted evacuees did leave the theater. Many others stayed overnight, believing—or at any rate, hoping—that buses would come the next day. Simon Shuster: Ukraine says it won’t give up land to Russia What the police did not say—possibly because they didn’t know, but perhaps because they didn’t want to deprive people of hope—was that there never would be an evacuation. On February 24, the first day of the war, city officials had begun assembling city buses at a depot near the intersection of Bakhchyvandzhy and Hromovoi Streets, about three kilometers southwest of the theater. For days, buses were being driven there and parked. About 100 were eventually gathered, and a group of volunteer police was recruited to drive them to Zaporizhzhia. With the vehicles and fuel stores on hand, an estimated 11,000 people could have been whisked out of Mariupol with each trip. But on March 4, hours before the evacuation was announced, the Russians started shelling the depot. They shelled it again and again, every day for a week. They did not stop until Bakhchyvandzhy and Hromovoi Streets were impassable, and every bus was either obliterated or damaged. The refugees didn’t learn this at the time. Years later, many still didn’t know. When Olena entered the theater that day, her physician instincts activated. She heard hacking coughs, labored breathing, and the sobbing and vomiting of malnourished and dehydrated children. Many people had a fever. Fecal matter was spreading from the backed-up toilets. Olena worried that there might be an outbreak of dysentery. She was surprised to learn that no one had yet died. She took Evgenia aside. “If we don’t do something right now,” Olena told her, “this theater will become a graveyard.” Most of Mariupol’s 19 hospitals were still open, but the doctors in them were overwhelmed with trauma victims from the siege. They had no time for illnesses, let alone for the great many people in the theater who were suffering from them. Just getting those people to the nearest hospital, the Regional Intensive Care Hospital, four kilometers west of the theater, would have been prohibitively dangerous anyway. “What can we do?” Evgenia asked her. “I can try to treat them here,” Olena said. She could set up a makeshift infirmary with some basic supplies and medicines, plus a few volunteer nurses. Evgenia and Serhii discussed the idea. It sounded improbable. They were not United Nations field-workers, but actors and artists suddenly charged with the safety of factory workers and shopkeepers, teachers and students. One thing they did know how to do, as theater people, was improvise: You began with an unlikely scenario and made it real. They’d been doing this together, night after night, for nearly two decades in the state-funded regional theater, becoming experts at working on the fly and on the cheap, at teasing unknown talents out of the untrained. On March 6, the 11th day of the war, Olena and Evgenia inspected the theater in search of a suitable room for an infirmary. As they walked, Evgenia took a rough head count. Two days earlier, the theater had housed 600 people. She now tallied about 1,500, nearly double the number of people who would have been in the building for a sold-out performance. On the ground floor, they came to dressing room No. 34, one of the last to be unoccupied, probably because it was locked. Evgenia retrieved the key and opened it. It wasn’t large, but it could fit several people. “This will do,” Olena said. Olena told Evgenia what she would need: antibiotics in pill, injection, or topical-cream form, and ideally all three; antiseptics in any form; and bandages, gauze, medical tape, and syringes, as many as could be scared up. The theater volunteers who’d been scavenging through shuttered and wrecked pharmacies brought Olena what they’d found, and they went out to find more. Olena’s daughter, Olha, joined her to work as a nurse, as did two professional nurses who’d moved into the theater with their families. When they opened the infirmary, a line of patients was already waiting outside dressing room No. 34. Olena started with the children, the most vulnerable refugees as well as the most likely vectors of new sicknesses in the theater. When Olena listened to the lungs of the infant daughter of a young mother, Viktoria, she found that the girl had double pneumonia, a dangerous condition for anyone at any time, and surely fatal for a nine-month-old in a wartime winter shelter if untreated. Olena prescribed a course of antibiotics and checked on the baby several times a day. Next, Olena treated the elderly. Six refugees were pregnant. Two people diagnosed with schizophrenia were living in the theater. “Imagine,” Olena told me later. “Here I had a little table, here is a mother sitting with a child and measuring their temperature, over here I have an elderly person with high blood pressure, and over here I have an injury and they’re leaking blood. I am working 360 degrees. In the same room were the nurses, giving injections and wrapping wounds.” Many refugees came to her complaining of the headaches and sores and bodily pains that come from extreme stress and extreme boredom, of bedding on cold floors and being awoken through the night by explosions. Olena sympathized—she had the same pains herself—but the painkillers in her cabinet had to be reserved for graver injuries, of which there were more all the time. Word of Olena’s infirmary spread throughout Mariupol’s central district, and locals caught in shellings and crossfire and building collapses came to seek her out. For two weeks, no one in the theater died. A mother settled into a spot in the corridor between the staff lounge and the offices where Olena lived with her husband and daughter. The woman was with her only child, 14-year-old Sashko. They’d walked across the city to the theater after a power station next to their apartment building exploded. Sashko was tall, and had a distinguished bearing but a still-boyish face, and a poetic way of speaking that seemed to combine the two. When I met Sahsko in France two years after these events, I asked him what it was like to move into the theater. He told me, “Allow me to tell you about one situation. My first morning in the theater started at 6 a.m. I woke up with a sharp pain in my back, as we slept on a simple stone floor. It was a beautiful sunrise, and everything was pink. I saw the whole city, and I had a feeling: The war should end today. Why? Because I couldn’t imagine that such a beautiful morning could be spoiled by bombings.” Sashko and his mother had arrived at the theater with nothing. But their first impulse was to pitch in and help others. She went to work in the outdoor kitchen. In a room near where they slept was a mother and her young son, who had cerebral palsy. Sashko’s mother helped take care of him. Sashko helped settle new arrivals and soon devised other useful projects. He had a knack for electronics. He’d heard about accidents in the darker parts of the theater, so he found a soldering iron, and with bulbs from the Christmas-tree lights that Evgenia had brought out and batteries from the stockroom, he built crude flashlights for the refugees. Sashko was making one of his flashlights when a Russian jet flew over Theater Square. Early that morning, his mother had gone to help in the outdoor kitchen, as usual. She’d returned to the office suite to bring Sashko breakfast, and then went back outside. Sashko had his earbuds in and was listening to music. He was so immersed in the work that he didn’t sense the blasts from a pair of roughly 500-kilogram bombs, which between them delivered the equivalent of as much as 1,200 kilograms of TNT. In time, he looked up from his work and noticed that the room was oddly bright. The wooden board that had been covering the window was now on the far side of the room. A boy was holding it as though someone had tossed it to him, a look of wonder on his face. Sashko’s first thought was that a rocket must have landed near the theater. He got up and walked from the room, his earbuds still in, the music still playing. There was no more door in the doorway, he noticed. The rocket blast must have been quite powerful, he thought. Robert F. Worth: Ukraine’s underground generation He walked out into the corridor, into what seemed like a bank of fog. He removed his earbuds. He could hear screaming. He stepped into the room where the boy with cerebral palsy lived. His mother was frantic—the boy’s heart had stopped. She begged Sashko to find Olena. Only then did Sashko remember that he didn’t know where his own mother was. He rushed down the stairs to the atrium and out to the southern side of the theater. He reached a slope of rubble. “Mama!” he yelled. He saw arms reaching out from the rubble. Some were still moving, others were stiff with death, others severed from bodies. Sashko noticed an arm. He sensed that he knew it. He approached it, focusing on the fingernails. He knew his mother’s pink polish. The arm was alone—it had been torn from her body. Sashko stared at the fingers for a long time. In a daze, he walked back into the theater and up the stairs, against the tide of people making their way outside, like Serhii had directed them to. Sashko passed through the theater’s entrance. A crowd had gathered in the plaza, looking up at the facade. The blasts had sent rubble and shrapnel hurtling through the theater’s portico and its tympanum, whose statuary muses, farmers, and metalsmiths were still upright but were backlit by sunbeams now that no masonry was behind them. Beside the facade, the blasts had caved in the roof of the building’s northwest wing. Rubble filled what had been the ground-floor windows. Sashko didn’t notice the frantic people knocking into him. He went back to the office suite. Olena and her daughter, Olha, were there. They looked at him. His eyes were glazed, his expression blank. Olena realized he was in shock, and she could guess why. “I saw him standing in the middle of the room, his eyes wide open, completely motionless,” Olena told me. She hugged him. Her husband, Ihor, seeing the smoking ruins, had believed that his wife was dead. He burst into the room and, finding Olena unharmed, sank to his knees, weeping and hugging her legs. When he finally stood up and gathered himself, Olena told him, “This is Sashko, our neighbor. His mother died. Now he will be our son.” “Okay,” Ihor said. Ihor; Olena; her daughter, Olha; and the boy, Sashko, packed up their belongings and salvaged what medicines they could from Olena’s infirmary. Ihor drove to the Prymorskyi District, where Olena’s mother was still living in her apartment. The street in front of her building was littered with rubble and corpses. They got Olena’s mother into the car, and Ihor pulled into the long caravan of vehicles heading out of Mariupol. This article was adapted from The Theater: Courage and Survival in the Defining Atrocity of the Ukraine War, which will be published later this month by Simon & Schuster.
Author: James Verini.
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