The crucible of Russia's cruelty.

In the early days of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian soldiers besieged Mariupol.

Residents hoped the war would prove short.

Instead, a brutal bombing of civilians came to symbolize Ukrainian sacrifice and revealed Vladimir Putin's true intentions.

Tonight, remembering one of Russia's most notorious war crimes as a turning point and unmistakable message.

Coming up on "Compass Points."

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Thank you.

Once again, from the David M. Rubenstein Studio at WETA in Washington, moderator Nick Schifrin.

Hello and welcome to "Compass Points."

It was perhaps the single worst act of civilian killing in Russia's long war on Ukraine.

The Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theater was the cultural center of Mariupol, the second largest city in Ukraine's southeast, home to a port, arts festivals, and iron and steel plants.

And then in February 2022, Russian forces defiled the city named for the Virgin Mary.

For more than 80 days, they reduced Mariupol to dust and debris and forced residents to submit or starve.

In the middle was the theater, converted into a shelter for residents taking refuge.

Outside, visible from space, the words ditey, or children, an appeal to Russian humanity that was answered with a direct hit.

We will never know how many women and children and families died that day, but as one Ukrainian put it, "That day we realized "the Russians had come to kill us."

That is an anecdote told by James Verini in his haunting portrait of death and survival "The Theater, Courage and Survival "in the Defining Atrocity of the Ukraine War," and James joins me now.

Thanks very much.

- Thanks for having me.

Schifrin: You label the destruction of the theater in Mariupol Russia's worst attack.

Quote, "the worst as in "the most telling, in the cruel candor with which the attack announced the war's innermost animus."

Why?

Well, it may be the worst civilian atrocity of the war just in terms of bodies, in terms of numbers of dead Ukrainians.

We'll never know, because we're never going to have a definitive body count.

But I believe it was the defining atrocity of the Ukraine war, and I'm not the only one to believe that, because it was... when the theater was bombed on March 16th of 2022 that we first realized the Ukrainians in the world, I believe, first realized just what Putin and the Kremlin and the Russian military were willing to do to prosecute this war.

And more specifically where Putin is concerned, we realized that we were going to have to begin taking him at his word.

You'll remember that for years before this, Putin had been banging on with increasing frequency and intensity about the fact that he didn't believe Ukraine was a real country, that it was a creation of some Western cartographical conspiracy, that there was no Ukraine outside of Russia.

And it was never clear how seriously we were supposed to take him when he was saying this.

Even in 2014, he only annexed Crimea and some of Donbass.

Schifrin: Southeastern Ukraine.

- Yeah, but with the full-scale invasion and then with this bombing of the theater, I think Ukrainians in the world realized, "Oh, we must begin taking him exactly at his word."

And we learned the nature of the war that was to come as well.

Verini: Yes.

- All right.

Let's go back in time.

Let's go back to Mariupol, this wonderful city of southeast Ukraine before the full-scale invasion.

We've got some video.

Actually, you can see it there.

Famous port city, steel and iron plants, cultural, really social capital of southeast Ukraine.

What was Mariupol like before the full-scale invasion?

Verini: It had a beautiful, although small, sort of Romanov city center.

It was a city of about 400 to 500 000 people.

That city center was surrounded by some of the biggest factories and steel plants in Ukraine, the Azovstal plant, most famously.

It was an industrial city, a very blue-collar city.

It had long been the port for goods coming out of the Donbass to go to the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea.

But it also was a very cultural city.

It was full of theaters, galleries, an acting school, an arts school.

And Mariupol, you'd see, we're very proud of how cultural their city was.

Before the school, the full-scale invasion, right before, U.S.

officials learned of what they believed were Russian plans.

They spoke to Ukrainian officials, European officials about it with great detail.

But there are two schools of response in Ukraine and specifically in Mariupol.

Many doubted the possibility of Putin actually going through with this.

One example who will track throughout this conversation, Ihor Navka.

He worked on the blast furnace crew at one of the city's main plants.

He doubted that Putin would ever do that, and that's Ihor right now, and we'll come back to him.

And this is Dmitry, or Dima Murantsev.

He knew that Putin was capable, what Putin was capable of, because he had lived under Russian occupation.

What expectation did the people of Mariupol have on February 23rd, 2022?

As you say, it varied.

Most Ukrainians I knew could not conceive of this invasion, even though they'd been invaded 7 and a half years previously.

They couldn't conceive of an invasion of this scale.

They didn't know why Putin would do it.

That's why they couldn't conceive of it.

They knew that he had the cruelty to do it, but they didn't think that heh ad the irrationality to do it.

He'd always been regarded until 2022 as a very rational actor, a pragmatist, a master of realpolitik.

They couldn't imagine him undertaking this risk to try to overtake the entirety of Ukraine.

And a few days into the siege, when they finally had to admit to themselves that this was a real siege, and this was a real war, even then the Mariupolitsy couldn't conceive of him besieging Mariupol quite in this way.

Because Putin had been saying for a long time that this was going to be a war of preservation.

They were invading Ukraine essentially in order to save Ukrainians from themselves.

And as one woman put it to me, if that's really how he thinks, and if he actually quite likes Ukraine, as he claims, and he wants to preserve it, not destroy it, then why would he destroy this lovely city of ours?

She couldn't understand the irony of that proposition.

Schifrin: And I would argue he ended up starving the city in order to, quote, save it.

More than 80-day siege of Mariupol, the apparent deliberate shelling of a maternity hospital, right, was among the defining images perhaps of the beginning of the war.

Cemeteries became so full, hundreds, perhaps thousands were buried in mass graves.

It seems to me that if the international community is ever able to fully tell the story, the city will be synonymous with places like Grozny, Stalingrad, and Guernica.

And you quote a volunteer policeman who was patrolling Mariupol in the beginning of the war, and he said this, "The apartment buildings "were destroyed and in ruins, "and you could hear the moans of the people from them.

"There are 50, 70, 90 people who are moaning, "begging you to get them out.

"And there is no special equipment in the city.

"And you understand that those people "are destined to die.

"The whole city was moaning."

That is horrifying.

Verini: Ihor Matiushyn, who had been a Soviet soldier and a commissar, and then become a Ukrainian nationalist, and then when the siege began, he could have got out of the city.

He was well-connected, but he decided to stay and to become a volunteer policeman to help those people who were trapped in the Khrushchevsky, trapped in the destroyed buildings.

Schifrin: You mean the old Soviet-style buildings?

Verini: Exactly, which had unlivable basements even before the siege, and people were living in the basements.

His wife, Olena, Dr.

Olena Matiushyn, ended up being the only doctor in the refugee shelter in the theater.

And between the two of them, they saved no one knows how many lives, a lot.

But this is the context, I mean that horror, that siege, those images that we saw out of the team that was there, just extraordinary.

And the depth of the depravity, I think, is what we really need to emphasize that people from Mariupol were shot.

I think by the end of it, something like 90% of the residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed, almost every hospital, most of the schools, the cultural buildings like the theater.

It was a full siege.

It was 81 days of wanton destruction, yeah.

And when that maternity hospital was hit, that was early enough that it wasn't clear whether these structures were being hit out of incompetence because we knew how bad the Russian targeting was, or because they were targeting civilians.

Once the theater was destroyed, it was very clear they were targeting civilians.

Schifrin: All right, so let's get to the theater now.

It becomes one of the primary places to shelter in Mariupol, as you write this.

"People from Mariupol trusted their theater.

"What was more, they liked going to it.

"It was a truly egalitarian place of culture."

So was the public's trust in the theater one of the reasons that it became one of the main shelters?

I believe so.

It had been a social hub.

So the theater was in a place in Mariupol on a hilltop downtown, where people would often meet to go on walks around the city.

It was the most popular cultural institution.

It had shows 7 days a week.

So people would often meet there to go shows.

Schifrin: And we can see it there before.

Verini: And the tickets were well-priced.

So yes, people trusted it.

It was this very stolid neoclassical building, but it had been completed in 1960.

And it was a center of attention for 60 years of the city and a beloved building.

They also trusted it because many people knew that it had a very solid basement, unlike many cities in Mariupol.

They also trusted it because, early on in the siege, the city government published a list of buildings with basements where refugees could gather.

And this was one of those buildings.

And then shortly thereafter, the government announced that there would be an evacuation from the city.

This was on March 5th.

Schifrin: Which never happened.

- Which never happened.

And that a convoy of city buses would be gathering at the theater to pick people up.

So hundreds and then thousands of people gathered there, hoping to be evacuated.

And they were never told those buses had been destroyed.

And that's a side story.

So that's where we are.

The theater becomes a kind of village for 1500 or so displaced, perhaps more.

The seats became beds.

You can see some of the conditions in there.

The displaced pets became a petting zoo in a kid's playroom, a patchwork kitchen fed 2500 people a day.

At one point, a pianist played Queen, "The Show Must Go On," every day.

And this is what Dima Murantsev, who we brought up before, told you.

And he also told the Center for Spatial Technologies, the Ukrainian research organization, that reconstituted the theater attack.

Let's take a listen.

[Speaking Ukrainian] Everything was fully packed with people.

Everyone would just step over the people.

There were already entire families lying on the floor.

You had to step over people to get somewhere.

Of course, we were lost, I believe just like anyone else who was there.

Was the story of life inside the theater before the attack a story of resilience, of fear, both?

Verini: Absolutely.

People were always afraid, but they forgot that because they had a job to do, which was to save one another.

The people who put this shelter together, like Dima and the people around him, none of them had experience as professional aid workers or even caregivers, aside from a couple of nurses and one doctor.

The people who assembled the refugee shelter in the theater were actors, lighting directors, janitors, administrators.

The main two people responsible for the refugee shelter was the former lighting director Evgenia and her husband Sergiy, who was an actor in the repertory theater.

They'd never done anything like this, of course.

But on March 5th, when everyone started gathering there, and they couldn't be evacuated, and they started piling into the theater, Evgenia and Sergiy and their colleagues realized, "We have no choice.

"We have to make this into a refugee shelter "or these people are going to die."

And that's what they did.

You talked about how they found strength that they didn't know they had.

And one of the people was Ihor Navka, who we mentioned before, who was a steel plant worker.

Verini: Yeah.

He spent every day, literally all day, every day, hauling buckets of water.

He never considered the possibility that they might die inside.

And this is what he said to the Center for Spatial Technologies.

Navka: [Speaking Ukrainian] We had no idea they would drop a bomb on us.

There were not even such thoughts.

How could it be?

The theater was filled with children and people.

I believe it was the safest there because both our military and the Russians knew there was no military there.

Were they just naive?

No, Ihor is certainly not naive.

Ihor is a very smart guy.

Ihor had worked since his teens in a steel plant, the Ilyich Steel Plant.

So it was his job, as you said, every day to go outside in the mornings, break the ice on the water tank.

And every day he would lower a bucket and get water.

And he would do that for 8, 10 hours a day, bring up buckets of water.

I suppose we could say they were naive if we wanted to be cynical about it.

I would say, let's say that they had a failure of imagination.

People like Ihor, he has Russian family.

Most people in Mariupol had Russian family.

That's one reason they were so baffled by this war is they didn't understand why Russia would want this.

They didn't understand why their family members in Russia could possibly want this.

And they didn't think that Russians were capable of an act this sinister.

There were some Ukrainians who were worried when Evgenia and her colleagues painted those giant signs, ditey, children, on either side of the theater.

There were the Ukrainians who said, "Oh, no Russian pilot with any humanity "will drop bombs on a building like this."

Others who knew better thought, "Actually, these signs may not be a warning.

"They may be a provocation.

"They may even be an invitation to a bombing," which is what they proved to be.

Schifrin: Let's talk about the bombing itself.

Horror, I think, is the best word to describe it.

And you quote the theater's musical director as describing it this way.

She, quote, "heard an all-enveloping clap "as though some deity "had smacked its giant palms together "upon the theater "and then felt a tremendous gust of air.

"When Vira opened her eyes, "she recalled, 'It was like everything had evaporated.'

"All that was around her, "the walls, the ceiling, the room, "the other people was replaced by white.

"It was as though time had stopped."

This is the most searing, some of the most searing passages in the book.

These people, these survivors remember this moment.

It is seared in their memories, and they were able to describe it in vivid detail.

Yeah, part of what's so horrifying about it and horror doesn't even begin to get at it.

It's unspeakable.

Part of what's so horrifying about it is what they didn't remember because blasts of that size in a contained space produce such a dust cloud and such a seismic shift in the structure itself that it wipes away your memory for a little while.

Your senses are encompassed by this dust.

Your ears are ringing.

A lot of people fell unconscious briefly.

So part of what was so frightening about listening to the accounts of people like Vira is what they don't remember.

They remember just coming to in this completely whited out world or they remember they were knocked unconscious and they remember coming to upside down or they didn't know what direction One defining memory that a lot of them had is that the theater had been dark for quite a while there was no electricity, of course, and then suddenly they look up, and they see the blue sky for the first time.

Verini: It's the eeriest thing.

So many of them who were inside, they were knocked unconscious and then when they looked up, they saw a sun shining into the theater because the roof had been torn off and the ceilings had collapsed.

So powerful were the explosions.

And one of the awful ironies of that day was it was a beautiful day.

It was sort of the first day of spring.

It was sunny and even a bit warm, and they hadn't seen the sun, a lot of them in quite a while as well.

It had been a long and gray winter.

So they looked up from these rubble piles up through the ceilings, what had been the ceilings and the roof to see this gorgeous blue sky.

And it was simultaneously, simultaneously very jarring and odd, but also for some of them, rather comforting.

Some of them took a sort of a much needed comfort in the sight of the blue sky.

And briefly, because there's so many different you tracked a lot of these people down.

A lot of couples have broken up.

Some people were able to speak to you, but some others didn't even want to relive the moment.

How much trauma have these folks experienced?

I mean, needless to say, a great deal.

I think they all have a similar amount of trauma.

The question is how they deal with it and whether they have the resilience to get through it.

That might be a matter of age.

I found that the younger people are processing it better.

People like Dima, who's now in Uzhhorod.

Schifrin: In Western Ukraine.

- In Western Ukraine.

And his former girlfriend, Liza, who now lives in Germany.

They were young enough that I think this did not shatter their worldview as such, in the way that it did for the older people.

For some of the older people, this so shattered their worldview.

Schifrin: In terms of how they saw Putin in Moscow and Russia and what Russia was.

Verini: The older people, you know, a lot of them had grown up in the Soviet Union.

And they thought of Ukraine and Russia as very much connected.

And this ended all of that.

And some of them will never mentally recover.

Sergiy, the actor in The Repertory Company, who's the co-director of the refugee shelter.

I went to go see him in Tallinn.

And he's a wreck.

He's a drunk.

We couldn't talk about the theater.

He broke down.

I don't know that he'll ever mentally recover from this.

On the other side, his ex-wife Evgenia now lives in France.

She has a new partner.

Their daughter is doing very well.

They've built a new life.

So I think a lot of it comes down to the personal resilience of the individual.

Schifrin: Let's talk about the whitewash.

This past December, Russian authorities reopened the theater.

We've got video of this.

They celebrated.

They put on a show about living happily ever after on top of bones and blood buried underneath.

Is your book a way to have some of the accountability that the Russians are clearly trying to whitewash?

If you like.

I'd like to think of it more as a way of putting down on paper the experiences and the memories of these people who would otherwise just be numbers, otherwise just be statistics to us.

We don't know if Russia ever carried out a forensic investigation on the site of the bombing, which seems unlikely.

They certainly haven't published it.

So all we really have from this day, we don't have much visual evidence either of the bombing.

What we mainly have is the testimony of these people.

And I wanted to put it down when I could.

If there are Russians who want to read it and they feel accountable, all the better.

But the main service I was trying to do was to the survivors and the dead.

And let's finally end with this idea of what this means and that point you just started to make about really crumbling so many worldviews.

So in the 2000s, you point out that the theater was known as the Donetsk Regional Academic Theater of the Russian Order of Honor.

It specialized in the Russian canon back then.

And you point out many people in Mariupol, ethnically, culturally Russian, but the full-scale invasion, as we kind of referenced at the top, but let's just make this point, the full-scale invasion and attacks like this one on the theater really have completely changed the identity of people in Mariupol and frankly, many people across Ukraine.

So let's listen to Ihor Navka on this again.

[Speaking Ukrainian] This will be a black mark for Russia for many, many years.

The ones who survived all this, they brought it to the world and keep speaking and telling the truth.

The world will know and remember this, and Russia will be an outcast for many, many years to come.

I think with this war, they brought hatred upon themselves for several generations.

Hatred upon themselves for several generations is a sentiment that I've heard, you've heard across Ukraine.

Since the full-scale invasion, I don't think this can be emphasized enough.

How much has the full-scale invasion, how much has the theater bombing specifically helped transform Ukraine's sense of identity?

Well, I think the war has created a nation where before we just had a tentative post-Soviet republic.

You and I were both there before the war.

We met plenty of Ukrainians who thought that they could be both Russian and Ukrainian at the same time.

Including in 2014 when I was there, and a lot of us there in Eastern and South Eastern Ukraine, in these cities that were genuinely divided back then.

Verini: Exactly.

There were a lot of very Russophilic Ukrainians.

And before 2022, before the theater bombing, they could have it both ways.

I think after the theater bombing, after the full-scale invasion, they could no longer have it both ways.

You had to decide what you were.

Were you Ukrainian or weren't you?

And the war, one of the great ironies of a war shot through with awful ironies is this war has created a nation in the way that nothing else could have done.

The Ukrainians never could have cohered in this way on their own.

It took this war to do that.

And it's created a real state.

Schifrin: And again, to make the point, it's not just the war itself.

It's the nature of it, right?

It's what we saw in Bucha and Irpin.

And I think the theater attack, right?

They put out ditey.

They put out the word children.

Verini: Yes.

Schifrin: Thinking that, "Oh, no Russian pilot," as you said, "would ever attack this."

And in fact, quite the opposite.

And in that sense, the theater attack, you rightly point out, was a real turning point for the war, for the country, for everyone inside of it, and the people who you're celebrating, these survivors.

Verini: I think that's right.

That survivor you mentioned at the top of the show put it best.

She said, "That day we realized why the Russians were here.

"They weren't here to fight NATO.

"They weren't here to fight neo-Nazis.

"They weren't here to protect Russian speakers "who were supposedly oppressed.

"They were here to kill us."

And by us, she didn't mean combatants.

She meant Ukrainians, Ukraine.

They were here to do away with the very idea of Ukraine, to do away with the idea that the Republic of Ukraine deserved to exist.

And faced with an enemy like that, what choice do you have?

Schifrin: Yeah, and again, the cultural capital that was this theater, the cultural, the social center that was Mariupol.

That's exactly what Russia, exactly what Putin claimed to have wanted to protect.

And that is exactly what he destroyed.

Verini: I think that's right.

This was an atrocity It was a civilian atrocity against a refugee shelter.

It was also a cultural atrocity.

It was propaganda of the deed.

It was Putin saying, "There is no such thing as Ukrainian culture."

Schifrin: Yeah, James Verini, it's been a pleasure.

Thank you so much.

The book is "The Theater, "Courage and Survival "in the Defining Atrocity of the Ukraine War."

Thank you very much.

And thank you for joining us.

I'm Nick Schifrin.

That's all the time we have.

We'll see you here again next week on "Compass Points."

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Upholding freedom by strengthening democracies at home and abroad.

Additional support is provided by Friends of the News Hour.

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