The mayor of the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol says more than 1,000 people were sheltering in a theater that was hit by a Russian air strike on March 16, leaving many civilians trapped and an unknown number of casualties.
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Mayor Vadym Boichenko posted the information on his Telegram channel early on March 17, calling the strike on the theater “another tragedy.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a video message on March 17 that people had sought protection from shelling in the theater and it was now destroyed, but he said there was no information on fatalities yet.
Mayoral adviser Petro Andrushchenko said the rubble was being cleared. “There are survivors. We don’t know about the (number of) victims yet,” he told Reuters by phone.
The nongovernmental organization Human Rights Watch said earlier that “hundreds of civilians” were sheltering in the theater.
“This raises serious concerns about what the intended target was in a city where civilians have already been under siege for days and telecommunications, power, water, and heating have been almost completely cut off,” Belkis Wille from the rights group said.
Satellite images from the firm Maxar showed the word “children” had been written in large white letters in Russian in front of and behind the building.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said the building was now “fully ruined” and said Russian forces “could not have not known this was a civilian shelter.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces had not struck the building, or anywhere else in Mariupol, according to the RIA Novosti news agency. Moscow denies targeting civilians despite ample evidence to the contrary documented by the media and residents and officials on the ground across the country.
The bombing of the theater prompted Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov to urge EU legislators to follow the U.S. lead and recognize Russian President Vladimir Putin as a war criminal. Reznikov made the appeal a day after U.S. President Joe Biden for the first time called Putin a war criminal.
“It’s not simply a war. It’s state terror. The regular army of the aggressor is conscientiously annihilating the civil population,” Reznikov said.
In the northern city of Chernihiv, Ukraine’s prosecutor-general said Russian forces killed 10 people who were waiting in line for bread. The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv had reported the incident earlier, saying Russian forces had shot the 10 victims. Russia denied the attack and said the incident was a hoax.
In Kyiv, at least one person was killed and three wounded after remains of a downed missile hit a residential building, Ukraine’s emergency service said on March 17.
WATCH: Ukrainian forces say they launched a successful counterattack against a Russian armored column in the Kyiv region. Ukrainian troops report that they liberated a village and destroyed several Russian armored vehicles. On March 15, RFE/RL correspondent Levko Stek surveyed the aftermath of the battle.
The 16-story building was struck around 5 a.m. local time, the emergency service said in a statement. A 35-hour curfew that Mayor Vitali Klitschko implemented the day before has now been lifted.
At the United Nations in New York, six countries have called for a Security Council meeting on Ukraine on March 17 ahead of an expected vote on a Russian resolution demanding protection for Ukrainian civilians “in vulnerable situations” that makes no mention of Moscow’s responsibility for the war.
“Russia is committing war crimes and targeting civilians,” Britain’s UN mission tweeted, announcing the call for the meeting that was joined by the United States, France and others.
“We will not vote for a Security Council resolution that does not recognise this crisis is Russia’s doing,” U.K. Ambassador Barbara Woodward said.
There were signs of progress at ongoing talks between Russia and Ukraine.
The Kremlin said negotiators were discussing a status for Ukraine similar to that of Austria or Sweden, both members of the European Union but not NATO.
“Neutral status is now being seriously discussed along, of course, with security guarantees,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said. “There are absolutely specific formulations which in my view are close to agreement.”
Vladimir Medinsky, Russia’s chief negotiator, told state TV, “Ukraine is offering an Austrian or Swedish version of a neutral demilitarized state, but at the same time a state with its own army and navy.”
Zelenskiy has said Ukraine could accept international security guarantees that stopped short of its goal to join NATO.
“My priorities during the negotiations are absolutely clear: the end of the war, guarantees of security, sovereignty, restoration of territorial integrity, real guarantees for our country, real protection for our country,” Zelenskiy said in his video address.
In Poland, the Border Guard Service said the number of refugees entering the country from Ukraine since Russia launched its unprovoked attack had reached 1.95 million, more than the population of the capital, Warsaw.
The Border Guard Service said on Twitter on March 17 that the previous day had seen an 11 percent drop in the number of people crossing into Poland.
It added that another 12,000 had already entered the country by 7 a.m. on March 17.
More than 3 million people have so far fled the fighting in Ukraine, according to the United Nations.
It is not clear how many refugees have remained in Poland, as many are thought to have traveled onward to third countries.
