“It sounded like a cork popping. Then the shrieking began.” A survivor of the Mariupol theatre bombing speaks

By Oliver Carroll

Dmytro Velychko, 34, was taking a breather after helping out in the theatre’s field kitchen when the bomb fell. The blast, he says, sounded like a champagne cork popping, a spring knocking you off balance. “We became enveloped in a thick cloud of glass, stones and dust. Then the shrieking began, the cries for help, the panic.” People were running. Those on upper floors groped their way down whatever remained of the stairs, desperate to leave. There was little hope for the people who had been in the kitchen and on the right side of the auditorium, the epicentre of the strike.

Only weeks before, theatre staff had been preparing for a premiere of a play on Frida Kahlo. But after Mariupol began its descent into hell at the end of February, the neoclassical theatre became a makeshift shelter for 1,300 people. On March 16th the theatre was bombed. Velychko was spared because he was on a coffee break: he’d moved a chair to the back of the theatre and was sitting in between windows. “Just a headache and bruise to my leg, would you believe it!” he says. “You could say I was lucky, but then you’d have to forget about everything else that went before it.”