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Pro-Russian troops enter Mariupol in an armored vehicle
Photo: STRINGER / REUTERS
Russian forces on Saturday pushed further into the besieged Ukrainian port of Mariupol, which was devastated after weeks of attacks.
A large steel mill was paralyzed during heavy fighting.
New satellite images should also show the destruction of the city's theater.
According to Ukrainian sources, the building was attacked on Wednesday and largely destroyed.
Kyiv and Moscow blamed each other for this.
According to authorities, more than a thousand people were sheltering in the theater at the time of the attack.
The human rights organization Human Rights Watch spoke of at least 500 civilians.
The theater had apparently been marked as a civilian shelter.
Satellite images taken by the private US company Maxar on Monday showed the building had the word "children" written in large letters on the floor in Russian at the front and back.
On a satellite image of the US company Maxar, which the BBC journalist Shayan
Sardarizadeh has now posted on Twitter, the serious damage the attack has caused to the building can be seen.
»As if swallowed up by the earth«
Meanwhile, the Russian troops are apparently trying to take the city, which has been hard fought for weeks, by any means necessary.
According to reports, the fighting also involves pro-Russian troops who do not wear any markings on their uniforms.
According to the BBC, the city's mayor, Vadym Boichenko, complains that the street fighting is also making it impossible to search for other survivors in the rubble of the destroyed theater.
There is "not even the smallest piece of land in the city that hasn't been marked by war," says Boichenko.
Taking Mariupol would be a major victory for Russian troops after they have been largely stuck outside the major cities for the past three weeks.
»Children and old people are dying.
The city is devastated and swallowed up by the face of the earth," Mikhail Vershnin, a Mariupol police officer, said in a video, according to the Associated Press news agency.
The clip shows him on a road strewn with rubble and rubble.
No help expected
Russian forces have already cut the city off from the Sea of Azov.
Her fall would link Crimea, which Russia annexed back in 2014, to Moscow-backed separatist areas in eastern Ukraine.
At the same time, Ukrainian and Russian forces are fighting over the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, Vadym Denysenko, adviser to Ukraine's interior minister, said on a TV program on Saturday.
»One of the largest steel works in Europe is currently being destroyed«.
Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, said the closest forces that could help Mariupol's defenders were already fighting "overwhelming enemy force" or were at least 100 kilometers away from the city.
There is currently "no military solution for Mariupol," he said late on Friday.
That was not only his opinion, but also “the opinion of the military”.
mak/AP
