One year ago, on March 16, 2022, at about 10 am, the Russian criminal army dropped a 500-kilogram air bomb on the Drama Theater in Mariupol, when a huge number of civilians were hiding there.
The Academic Regional Drama Theater in Mariupol is located in the center of the city. One of the best bomb shelters in Mariupol was located inside the building. On March 5, 2022, local residents began to come to the theater en masse, as they expected Russia to open a humanitarian corridor, but the promised evacuation never happened. Many women, children and elderly people continued to hide in the premises of the drama theater. At that time there were about 1,000 of them. To protect themselves from Russian attacks, local residents capitalized the word “CHILDREN” with white paint in front of the theater, but despite this, the Russians still dropped a bomb on the building and said that Ukrainian army soldiers were there. How many civilians died that day is not exactly known. According to the victims and witnesses’ testimonies, there were from 400 to more than 1 thousand people dead.
It is worth noting that every day there is information about new and new crimes of Russian soldiers against Ukrainians, who thus carry out a real genocide. Last spring in the city of Brovary, Kyiv region, drunken Russian soldiers entered the courtyard of one of the houses where a young family lived. The father was severely beaten, brought to his knees. They started raping his wife, after which one of the soldiers told their four-year-old daughter that he would “make a woman out of her” and also carried out violent actions against the child.
In addition to sexual violence, the occupying country also takes Ukrainian children from the occupied part of Ukraine to Russia under the guise of “holiday”. According to official data, it is known today that about 16,000 children were forcibly or by deception taken to the territory of the Russian Federation.
The international community should establish an international tribunal against Russia so that those responsible for the thousands of deaths of innocent Ukrainians are punished. If Russia escapes this punishment, then even more cruel crimes can be expected from it in the future, not only against Ukraine, but also against other countries.