Living Through Russia’s ‘Complete Extermination’ of a Ukrainian City
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- James Verini's new book, The Theater: Courage and Survival in the Defining Atrocity of the Ukraine War, tells the story of refugees who sheltered in Mariupol's Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theater after Russia invaded in February 2022.
- Russian forces encircled Mariupol beginning February 24, 2022, with roughly 190,000 troops and an 81-day barrage of shells, rockets, and mortars that cut off power, gas, water, phone, and internet service.
- Liza (Elizaveta Fatayeva), a 19-year-old amateur actress, and her boyfriend Dima Murantsev, an acting student, fled to the Drama Theater on March 5 after a promised humanitarian corridor evacuation failed, only to find it already packed with refugees.
- Volunteers led by the theater's lighting director transformed the building into a shelter over 10 days, setting up a field kitchen, infirmary, and diesel generators; at peak it slept 1,500 people a night with twice as many passing through.
- Liza and Dima coped with the trauma by performing scenes from plays they had studied and staging a conceptual piece called A Farewell to Arms, using a wooden chair arm as a prop spear and machine gun.
- President Zelensky's early wartime national address offered no operational details about the invasion, focusing instead on fortitude and solace, before he became the internationally recognized wartime leader.
- The Drama Theater was ultimately destroyed by Russian bombs after serving as the city's most famous refugee shelter, though the book excerpt ends before describing the attack itself.
Why it matters: Verini's book reconstructs the human cost of the Mariupol siege — 81 days of bombardment, a population trapped without utilities, and a promised evacuation that never came — through the specific experience of two young actors, giving granular texture to an atrocity often summarized in casualty figures. The theater's transformation into a 1,500-person shelter run by the lighting director illustrates how civilians improvised survival infrastructure when official systems collapsed.
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