Desperation Mounts for Ukrainians in Mariupol as Russia Tries to Take the Key City

For weeks Mariupol has been the target of relentless shelling by Russian forces seeking to advance along Ukraine’s southern coast. Russia has long coveted Mariupol for its strategic location 35 miles west of the Russian border on the Azov Sea. Controlling the strip of land from Mariupol to Crimea would alleviate Moscow’s logistical complications in supplying and administering the peninsula it annexed in 2014 and solidify its grip on Ukraine’s southern coast and seaborne export economy.

The entrance to a bomb shelter under the theater was blocked by rubble when the building partially collapsed, said

Pavlo Kyrylenko,

head of the regional military administration in the eastern region of Donetsk. Former governor

Sergiy Taruta

said on Thursday the bomb shelter had remained intact, and there were survivors.

A resident of Mariupol who escaped the city told a Ukrainian TV channel there had been more than 1,000 people in the theater before it was bombed, sheltering in an underground bunker, in the main auditorium and on stage.

“It was a symbol of the city,” said

Mykola Osychenko,

the chief executive of Mariupol TV, one of the city’s three channels, which is now off the air, its offices destroyed by recent shelling. “It showed that the city is not only a city of metallurgical engineers but also a city of people who in addition to being tough working people are not alien to art.”

The people who had taken refuge in the building were principally those who had lost their homes in Russia’s bombardment of the city, Mr. Osychenko said.

“People left their houses and went toward the drama theater because there was nowhere else to live,” he said. “Every day there were more and more of them.”

Other residents visited the theater’s cellar kitchen for subsistence meals. There was no electricity there.

In recent days, residents collected rocks and used them to spell the word “children” on the ground near the theater, signaling to overhead aircraft the partial composition of the theater’s population.

Ukraine’s President

Volodymyr Zelensky

accused Russia of deliberately attacking the theater in an overnight speech, adding that the death toll is still unknown.

Russia’s Defense Ministry denied its forces conducted an airstrike on the theater. A spokesman for the ministry on Thursday said the country’s armed forces had destroyed 46 Ukrainian military targets in the past day, including an S-300 antiaircraft system, an arms depot in the western city of Rivne and three Bayraktar drones.

Deputy Mayor

Serhii Orlov

said between 80% to 90% of Mariupol had been destroyed and there was no electricity or running water. Residents have resorted to melting snow, collecting puddle water and draining radiators to drink, he said.

Russian forces have also trapped several hundred people in a hospital in Mariupol, according to Mr. Kyrylenko. A convoy of food, water and medicine destined for the city has been held up for several days by Russian forces near Berdyansk. Efforts to arrange an evacuation of civilians from the city have also failed, but several thousand managed to get out in their own vehicles this week.

“We were a regular, peaceful city and they turned us into a hell,” said

Mykola Trofmenko,

the head of Mariupol State University, who left the city on Tuesday.

For two weeks, Mr. Trofmenko was sheltering in the basement of the three-story building with about 80 people, along with his wife and son.

Communications going in and out of Mariupol were cut during the early part of Russia’s invasion, which began on Feb. 24, leaving residents uninformed about progress of the war. They ate little, so the food they had stockpiled would last longer, he said.

When the power cut out at the end of February they took food out of the refrigerator and put it outdoors, coating meat in salt to keep it from spoiling. They cooked on an open fire in the yard, diving for cover in the basement when they heard the whistle of incoming artillery.

By the third week, the children had learned to distinguish the sounds of different weapons and where they were fired from. “They became experts,” Mr. Trofmenko said.

The city council dug ditches in the park for people to dispose of the dead. Unable to get to the main hospital because Russian forces are holding several hundred people hostage inside, a doctor was forced to amputate the leg of a wounded person without anesthetic, using a kitchen knife, he said.

Before the theater bombing in Mariupol, an adviser to the mayor said that the city’s death toll was significantly higher than the 2,357 casualties officially confirmed, putting it closer to 20,000.

“It is currently impossible to determine the exact number of victims,” said

Petro Andryushchenko.

Survivors are crammed into basements without food, and drinking water from the drains, he added.

Corpses lie in the street, as heavy shelling prevents residents from burying them, he said. “Death is everywhere.”

Some 20,000 people managed to flee Mariupol in their own vehicles on Tuesday, Mr. Zelensky said. More than three million people have fled Ukraine since the war began, according to United Nations figures.

Edgar Gevargian,

38, tried to convince his family to leave Mariupol days before the invasion, but they refused. At first the bombardment was sporadic, but as it intensified, panic buying emptied the shelves of grocery stores.

As desperation mounted, money lost its value. They needed more gasoline, but the only currency for which it could be traded was cigarettes, which Mr. Gevargian didn’t have. Instead, he attempted to barter five bottles of expensive cognac, but nobody was willing to exchange alcohol for gasoline.

Eventually Mr. Gevargian found someone who had broken into a shop and obtained a large quantity of cigarettes, some of which he was willing to exchange for the cognac. With the cigarettes, he was able to obtain 25 liters of gasoline. When other residents broke into a gas station, he was able to exchange more cigarettes for a further 20 liters of gasoline.

On Tuesday, Mr. Gevargian joined a vehicle convoy with his wife and two children, fleeing the city.

Two major steel mills, Azovstal and Ilyich Iron and Steel Works, dominate Mariupol and are an industrial prize for invading forces. Before Russia instituted a naval blockade last month, Mariupol’s port handled these steel exports along with others, largely of grain and clay.

Russia and its proxy forces from the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic seized Mariupol briefly in 2014 before the Ukrainian military regained it. In the eight years since, the city has been wedged between Russia to its east and the front line of the Donbas war less than 10 miles to its north, aggravating Moscow.

In the wake of 2014’s upheaval, Mariupol’s dramatic theater, the masks of tragedy and comedy ornamenting its facade, revived regular musical and theatrical performances, as well as graduation ceremonies for Mariupol State University, helping residents resume their lives despite the constant threat of war.

The theater bombing came after Mr. Zelensky, in a virtual address to members of Congress, pressed the U.S. to provide more weapons and increase economic pressure on Russia. Mr. Zelensky addressed the German parliament Thursday, saying the nation should take the lead in helping Ukraine, after propping up Russian President

Vladimir Putin’s

regime through trade for years. Germany should set up an airlift for humanitarian aid to his country, among other initiatives, he said.

Mr. Zelensky’s remarks followed similar appeals to the European Union, the U.K. House of Commons and Canada’s parliament.

President Biden pledged an additional $800 million in security assistance to Ukraine following Mr. Zelensky’s remarks, bringing the total to $1 billion over the past week.

“We’re going to give Ukraine the arms to fight and defend themselves through all the difficult days ahead,” Mr. Biden said at the White House.

Mr. Biden also told reporters he thought Mr. Putin was a war criminal, a sign of escalating rhetoric during the conflict. Kremlin spokesman

Dmitry Peskov

said Moscow considered Mr. Biden’s comment “unacceptable and unforgivable.”

Slovakia has agreed to send an S-300 air-defense system to Ukraine, if it received a Patriot missile battery as a replacement, a senior Slovak official said. The S-300 is a Soviet-designed missile battery made to intercept incoming missiles and destroy jet fighters. Germany later said it would dispatch Patriot systems to Slovakia.

Sending such a system into the country would mark a step up in the effort by North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies to help Ukraine shoot Russian war planes and missiles out of the sky.

Russian forces have increasingly resorted to bombing residential areas and civilian infrastructure in an effort to wear down Ukrainian resistance. More than 100 children have been killed in three weeks of conflict, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General

Iryna Venediktova

said before the bombing of the theater in Mariupol.

Ms. Venediktova met on Wednesday with

Karim Khan,

prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, which has opened an investigation into possible war crimes in Ukraine.

—Georgi Kantchev, Drew Hinshaw and Evan Gershkovich contributed to this article.

Write to Isabel Coles at isabel.coles@wsj.com and Brett Forrest at brett.forrest@wsj.com