Ukraine accuses Russia of bombing theatre sheltering civilians

KYIV: Ukraine accused Russia of bombing a theatre that was sheltering more than 1,000 civilians in the city of Mariupol as US President Joe Biden branded Vladimir Putin a “war criminal”.

The latest assaults on civilians across Ukraine came as President Volodymyr Zelensky made a searing appeal for help to the United States, which responded by pledging $1 billion in new weapons to fight Russia’s invading army.

Officials across Ukraine are struggling to count the civilian dead with authorities saying 103 children have been killed since the invasion began, who have been targeted in homes, hospitals, ambulances and food queues.

In the port city of Mariupol — where more than 2,000 people have died so far — a Russian bomb hit the Drama Theatre, which city council officials said had been housing over 1,000 people.

“The only word to describe what has happened today is genocide, genocide of our nation, our Ukrainian people,” the city’s mayor Vadim Boychenko said in a video message on Telegram. “We have difficulty understanding all of this, we refuse to believe, we want to close our eyes and forget the nightmare that happened today,” he said.

Satellite images of the theatre on March 14 shared by a private satellite company showed the words “children” clearly etched out in the ground in Russian on either side of the building. Officials posted a photo of the building, whose middle part was completely destroyed, with thick white smoke rising from the rubble after they said a bomb was dropped from an airplane.

“It is impossible to find words to describe the level of cynicism and cruelty, with which Russian invaders are destroying peaceful residents of a Ukrainian city by the sea,” an official statement read.

Russia’s defence ministry denied it had targeted the theatre, instead claiming that the building had been mined and blown up by members of Ukraine’s far-right Azov Battalion.

READ MORE: Ukraine claims Russia bombed children’s hospital in Mariupol

In a statement, Human Rights Watch said that while it couldn’t rule out the “possibility of a Ukrainian military target in the area of the theatre… we do know that the theatre had been housing at least 500 civilians.”

In an address to the US Congress, Zelensky invoked Pearl Harbor, the 9/11 attacks and Martin Luther King Jr as he showed lawmakers a video of the wrenching effect of three weeks of Russian attacks.

Zelensky, dressed in military green, demanded Washington and its NATO allies impose a no-fly zone, so that “Russia would not be able to terrorize our free cities.” Switching to English, Zelensky addressed Biden directly, saying: “I wish you to be the leader of the world. Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.”

Biden and NATO have resisted Zelensky’s pleas for direct involvement against nuclear-armed Russia. Biden announced the United States’ latest package of new weapons aid to Ukraine added up to $1 billion and would help acquire longer-range anti-aircraft weapons.

The US president also stepped up his condemnation of the Russian leader, describing him as a “war criminal.” The Kremlin called the comment “unacceptable and unforgivable on the part of the head of a state whose bombs have killed hundreds of thousands of people around the world.”