Today, the Associated Press publishes an important report. “AP evidence points to 600 dead in Mariupol theater airstrike.” More on this in a moment.
Tomorrow, May 5, from 2 to 3, the National Review Institute will host a webinar with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. To register, go here. The subject will be Ukraine — specifically, the war crimes committed by Russian forces there.
Speakers will include Lee Edwards, Andy Milburn, and Elizabeth Edwards Spalding. I will say a brief word about each. Mr. Edwards is the co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Victims of Communism foundation. (For a piece I wrote about VOC in 2014 — “Living Not by Lies” — go here.) Mr. Milburn is a retired Marine Corps colonel who was deputy commander of Special Operations Command Central. Ms. Spalding is the vice chairman of VOC and the founding director of its museum.
They all have very interesting and important things to say. (I will do a little moderating.) They will discuss, among other things, painful continuities between the Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia. Again, to register for the webinar, go here.
The theater in Mariupol, Ukraine, had served as that city’s main bomb shelter. On March 16, Russian forces attacked it, killing some 600 people. That number is higher than once thought, or feared. The real number could be higher yet, according to survivors.
Today’s report from the AP begins,
She stood in just her bathrobe in the freezing basement of the Mariupol theater, coated in white plaster dust shaken loose by the explosion. Her husband tugged at her to leave and begged her to cover her eyes.
But she couldn’t help it — Oksana Syomina looked. And to this day, she wishes she hadn’t. Bodies were strewn everywhere, including those of children. By the main exit, a little girl lay still on the floor.
Syomina had to step on the dead to escape the building that had served as the Ukrainian city’s main bomb shelter for more than a week. The wounded screamed, as did those trying to find loved ones. Syomina, her husband and about 30 others ran blindly toward the sea and up the shore for almost five miles (eight kilometers) without stopping, the theater in ruins behind them.
“All the people are still under the rubble, because the rubble is still there — no one dug them up,” Syomina said, weeping at the memory. “This is one big mass grave.”