Операции под фальшивым флагом

Бомбардировка Мариупольского театра - 2022

Bombing of a shelter

The Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theatre in Mariupol, Ukraine, was used as a bomb shelter during the siege of Mariupol since the beginning of the Russian invasion. It housed between 500 and 1,200 civilians, mostly women and children. In two places around the theater, the word Дети [Deti] or Children was therefore written in large letters on the ground. Pilots could clearly see it from the air, and it was also clearly visible on satellite images. This did not prevent the Russian army from bombing the theatre from the air with two bombs, each weighing 500 kg TNT equivalent, just after 10 o'clock in the morning on March 16, 2022.

Театр с надписью Дети на земле

The theatre’s bomb shelter was not directly hit by the bombs, but many people were trapped under the burning rubble. In addition, rescue efforts were hampered by the ongoing attacks on the area by Russian forces. The Associated Press news agency, which had thoroughly investigated the attack, counted more than 600 fatalities. On July 11, 2022, it was reported that the exact number could not be determined because the bodies were cleared by the Russian army and taken to an unknown location.

Russian fabrications

The Russian Ministry of Defense stated on March 17 that the building was never a target of Russian troops. According to the Ministry, no airstrikes were carried out on ground targets on March 16, and the notorious far-right Ukrainian militant group Azov would have undermined and blown up the theater from within. However, as often happens, Russia had failed to properly coordinate the official narrative, because that same day, a contradictory statement was given by Eduard Alelsandrovich Basurin (°1966), the official representative of the People's Militia of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic. In an interview with the RIA news agency, Basurin stated that «militants from the headquarters of the Ukrainian nationalist battalion Azov deliberately fired tanks at the drama theater in Mariupol in order to accuse Russia of the bombings and create a corresponding image for the media»

Эдуард Александрович Басурин

Independent investigations

However, all independent investigations showed that neither the version of a possible subversion put forward by the Russian Ministry of Defense nor the version of a tank attack launched by Basurin could be true. The found debris showed that the theatre was bombed from the air.

The investigative platform InformNapalm, which had already managed to identify the people responsible for the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 in 2014, published a report on March 29, 2023 proving that the attack on the Mariupol theater was carried out from the air, and was led by colonel Sergei Valerievich Atroshchenko (°1981), who himself was born in Ovruch, a town in the Zhitomir region of Ukraine. InformNapalm received this information from the group Кібер Спротив [Kiber Sprotiv] or Cyber ​​Resistance. This group had managed to hack Atroshenko's computer. In addition to a few spicy selfies that he apparently regularly received at work from his spouse Lilia Aleksandrovna, the hackers were able to download hundreds of documents and emails which they passed on to the InformNapalm platform and to the Ukrainian armed forces.

Sergei Atroshchenko was the commander of squadron 75387 of the 960th Assault Aviation Regiment of the Russian Army. The planes that carried out the bombing of the theatre took off from the Primorsko-Akhtarsk air base in the Krasnodar region.

Сергей и Лилия Атрощенко

Atroshchenko was generously rewarded for his work. On February 21, 2025, Putin signed a presidential decree promoting Atroshchenko to Major- General.

Criticism is severely punished

In March 2022, Russian journalist Maria Nikolaevna Ponomarenko (°1978) published a message on the Telegram channel No Censorship about the residents of Mariupol who died during the Russian bombardment of the city theatre. In April, she was arrested for «discrediting the Russian Armed Forces».

On February 15, 2023, the Leninsky Court in Barnaul sentenced her to 6 years in prison in penal colony IK-6 in Shipunovo, under Article 207.3 of the Russian Criminal Code, which prohibits «disseminating deliberately false information about the Russian Armed Forces.» Because she remained combative, the regime reopened a criminal case against Ponomarenko in November 2023. On March 22, 2025, she saw one year and ten months added to her sentence, and after her release she must undergo psychiatric treatment, the length of which no one can say in advance.

Мария Николаевна Пономаренко