Survivors Emerge From Ukrainian Theater Bombed in Russian Airstrike
LVIV, Ukraine—Rescuers searched Friday for more survivors after evacuating 130 people from the wreckage of a theater-turned-bomb shelter in Mariupol in recent days, following a Russian airstrike, said Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky.
“Hundreds of Mariupol residents are still under the debris,” he said during his latest address to the nation. “Despite the shelling, despite all the difficulties, we will continue rescue work.”
About 1,300 remained trapped in the basement of the theater, said
Lyudmyla Denisova,
Ukraine’s human-rights commissioner, adding that it was difficult to be certain of the number of survivors. She didn’t confirm any casualties.
“We hope that they will be alive but as of now we have no information about them,” she said in a local television interview.
Efforts to sort through the wreckage and rescue any survivors are being hampered because rescue services have been decimated by the attack on the southern port city.
Getting medical treatment to those injured could be difficult, because “a lot of doctors have been killed,” former Governor
Sergiy Taruta
said overnight.
Ukrainian civilians sought shelter at the theater as Mariupol has been the target of relentless shelling by Russian forces seeking to advance along Ukraine’s southern coast.
Moscow has long coveted Mariupol for its strategic location 35 miles west of the Russian border on the Azov Sea. Russia’s Defense Ministry denied its forces conducted an airstrike on the theater.
Elsewhere in Ukraine, Russian missiles hit an aircraft-repair facility in the western part of the country on Friday, striking a long-range target far from the battlefield while attacks continued on other cities.
The Ukrainian air force said six cruise missiles were fired from the Black Sea. Two were intercepted, preventing them from reaching their target near the airport in the western city of Lviv, about 50 miles from the Polish border. Polish immigration authorities said Friday that the number of people who have fled Ukraine for Poland has now surpassed two million. More than three million Ukrainians have fled the country since the war began, according to the United Nations refugee agency.
A building was destroyed, according to Lviv’s mayor,
Andriy Sadovyi,
who said work at the facility had been suspended before the strike. One person was wounded, and rescue workers were on site putting out a fire, said
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