The tragedy of war on the stage of a drama theater: the Square of the Innocently Murdered

Saltivka had already been defeated, the Palace of Labor had been bombed, and many people had been killed, wounded, burned alive, and turned to ashes in Kharkiv. I almost wrote “Germans,” but no - the Russians are standing near Kyiv.

But there was no sense of a long war coming. Kharkiv and Kyiv were not broken and not surrounded, the Russian subversive group was destroyed in Kharkiv on Shevchenko Street, and there was a simple human hope that this “horror should not happen, because it cannot happen.”

I remember well that March morning: a TV report from a Mariupol theater. I think it was filmed deliberately to show that only civilians were hiding here, and the cameraman's camera shows a panorama of what was happening in the theater - a huge number of elderly people and mothers with children.

Someone is giving an interview on camera. The women's faces are desperate. They are afraid not for themselves, but for their children...

This report, this footage, shown on all Ukrainian TV channels and on YouTube, was seen by all the intelligence and military agencies of the world. It was also seen in Moscow, including the Kremlin press service, where staff works around the clock to monitor all the world's national and regional TV broadcasts in search of open information, compiling relevant information and analytical reports for their superiors.

And I cannot forget the evening of the same day, when my blood literally froze in my veins and it became difficult to breathe with anger, grief and rage. A Russian pilot dropped a one-and-a-half-ton bomb on the Mariupol Drama Theater. The theater is on fire...

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