THE THEATER

A vicious attack on civilians.

This is essential reporting about a defining atrocity of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Verini’s focus is Mariupol, Ukraine, where in March 2022, Russia bombed a theater sheltering refugees, killing as many as 200, according to credible estimates. Much like They Will Have To Die Now (2019), his book on an Iraqi city taken by ISIS, Verini’s informative interviews and no-nonsense prose bring us as close as possible to his subjects’ experiences. As ceilings and walls collapse, some survivors are knocked unconscious. Others dig through rubble in search of loved ones. A boy learns his mother has died when he spots her pink nail polish on a severed arm. After, there are mass graves and maddening claims by zombis—the local term for those brainwashed by Vladimir Putin’s propaganda—that the bombing was a hoax. Verini’s description of the carnage is especially powerful because it’s preceded by sharp profiles of the refugees. We come to know them as students, actors, and laborers before they’re victims. In the days prior to the bombing, a refugee-physician establishes a “makeshift infirmary,” treating a pneumonia-stricken baby in the theater’s spotlight booth. Working with a soldering iron and the bulbs of Christmas tree lights, a handy teen builds “crude flashlights” for refugees. A scrappy girl arrives at the theater with little more than the boxing medals she’s won. Verini lets us hear his subjects—Putin is “Botoks Oblychchia, ‘Botox Face,’ or simply svolota, ‘bastard’”—but doesn’t sentimentalize their bravery. Some emerged as heroes, but others “wouldn’t spare a piece of firewood for a freezing grandmother.” Summoning an almost unbearably plaintive image, he describes how before the attack, refugees painted “children” in huge Russian letters in front and back of the building, which a Russian pilot “must have seen” as he “depressed the bomb-release button on his stick grip.”

An authoritative account of Russia’s bombing of a shelter for displaced Ukrainians.